


To Safeguard These Things

by Cryo_Bucky, lbmisscharlie



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Art, Art History, Artist Steve Rogers, Captain America Big Bang 2018 | cabigbang, Domestic, Established Relationship, M/M, Monuments Men, Politics, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Queer New York, quite frankly a lot of feelings about art, socialist steve rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-21
Updated: 2018-10-21
Packaged: 2019-08-05 11:22:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 38,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16366940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cryo_Bucky/pseuds/Cryo_Bucky, https://archiveofourown.org/users/lbmisscharlie/pseuds/lbmisscharlie
Summary: In 1944, Steve Rogers lands in Italy with a uniform, a list of endangered monuments, and whatever authority he can muster up by grit and determination. Steve barely scraped by in Basic, but as a Monuments Man his mission is nothing less than the preservation of humanity’s legacy.All things made precious by time, beauty, and love are threatened in wartime. If one man can save even a few, it must be worth it.





	1. Part 1

**Author's Note:**

> A very large enormous thanks to my dearest [Peninsulam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/peninsulam) for being the best partner, beta, and sounding board a person could ask for. Thanks and a very grand tip of the hat to [Cryo_Bucky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryo_bucky) for amazing artwork that really brings some of my very favorite scenes to life, and for being very patient when I got behind.

September 1937, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Ma doesn’t believe in walking through museums with someone else. “You can’t have an aesthetic epiphany if you’re waiting for someone else to catch up,” she’d say, and chivvy him off one way while she went the other. He’d seen the Temple of Dendur like that, gazing up in wonderment until his neck hurt, seen his own face reflected in the gleaming brass of Brancusi’s bird, seen a lot of naked bodies that didn’t usually make him blush unless Bucky was along, elbowing him in the side and waggling his eyebrows. He’s never been out of New York, but New York has plenty to see.

Today, though, by silent agreement he walks next to Ma, hand cupping her elbow gently, and they shuffle together at her aching pace. In the quiet of the gallery space, the wheeze of her breath rattles like its own thing, an entity that she drags along with her. The bones of her elbow, in his palm, are sharp. Only a couple other visitors meander the rooms of the townhouse, empty of its grand and ancient furniture and holding marvels just-made: Matisse and Klee, the gleaming chrome of the Bauhaus, a handful of Cezannes as a nod to the past, and the occasional Corot to appease the lovers of realism. Their admission fee, they’re informed when walking in, will go to the grand new building that will soon take the place of the townhouse, a new temple to new ideas. Steve’ll miss this building, a little, will miss the memory of walking up the narrow steps with Ma once a season, to see each new exhibition. 

He’d once, around about fifteen and in the middle of a miserable, rheumatic-fevered winter, asked Ma to stop spending what little they had on admission fees. Medicine was spendy and what she brought home from nursing only just about kept them in their little railway apartment. “It’s my job to take care of your health,” she’d said, “body and mind.” That had been that; as soon as he recovered enough to be up and about they’d gone to the newly-opened show on folk art at the Whitney. 

Ma has broad-reaching and catholic tastes, so one month they might see Dutch still life masters and another grand Hudson River landscapes, might wander through Ashurnasirpal’s royal court at the Met or immerse themselves in the sharp-drawn lines of Demuth and O’Keefe. As he’d started to work more in charcoal and pastel — no space nor money for oils, but he doesn’t mind the soft smudge of charcoal on his fingers — Steve had found himself more and more drawn to modernism, to folks still alive and working and searching for new ways to express ideas that seemed, at once, achingly ancient and so particularly modern. He isn’t quite a feature in the gallery district, too aware of the way the gaze of the attendants take in his patched shirts and too-big trousers, handed down from Bucky or picked up at a church rummage, but he does muster up his courage to see what’s new at Société Anonyme or the Montross occasionally.

Today it’s Ma’s choice. It’s been her choice for a few months now; it’s her exhaustion they have to mark, these days, her persistent cough, and so he’s deferred to her in deciding which shows to see and which to skip. He’d wanted to see the somber war etchings, too, though, drawn both by Otto Dix’s reputation and the reports coming out of Germany that he’s one of those artists declared degenerate, his works gathered up from public collections alongside his modernist compatriots and amassed away for some unknown purpose. What in ink and paper could be so dangerous?

On the somber white walls, each print is framed in black, wide white mat just a shade brighter than the creamy paper, an antiseptic touch against the jagged slashes of black ink making up twisted, agonized bodies made grotesque by gas masks or impaled on barbed lines of fence. Four years of bloody, harsh war and a flirtation with expressionism had left Otto Dix despairing of the ability of modernism to depict the horrors and depravities of war. He turned, instead, to printmaking, like his compatriate Kathe Kollwitz, like Duhrer before them. The etchings bear little similarities to the bright, spiraling colors of Kandinsky or Klee, who, according to reports, are also included in the German seizures of art. Rather, they bring to mind the nightmares of Goya, monstrous and agonizing.

Pausing at a print depicting a frenzied circle of bodies, not dancing but contorted, impaled through necks and chests and legs with the broken ends of fence posts, all entwined with twisted coils of barbed wire, Ma heaves a breath. “This is what it was like,” she says, reaching one hand out as though pointing at the same scene, far in the distance. “These are the things I saw.” Her voice is quiet, so low Steve can barely hear it, even with his good ear tilted toward her. She never talks about the war and her experiences as a nurse in France, and he thinks he should want to ask questions. In front of them, the dead bodies seem ripe with decay already, their bloated contours cut with deep, dragging lines, and as he looks closer he sees that what he took to be a layered profusion of whole bodies is, in fact, fragments, a severed leg here, a hand clawing with no arm attached there. 

Ma coughs, mouth pressed against the back of her fist. Fishing in his pocket for a handkerchief, Steve thinks about her blood splattering wet and red across the gallery wall, live droplets clinging to the prints where Dix has left only black pools of ink. She’d coughed up blood that morning, a weak spray escaping her hand and leaving a mist on the countertop. It is happening more and more; he’d seen the dark hearts of her handkerchiefs nestled deep in her palms, a sleight of hand she can’t quite pull off anymore. “Come sit,” he says, trying to guide her to the bench in the middle of the room, but she shakes her head. 

“I want to see it all,” she says, in a tone meant to remind him that she’s still his mother. He goes with her to the next print.

++

They pause on each stair landing on their way out. Ma doesn’t speak, her breath caught up in the exertion, and for once Steve finds himself the one babbling, murmuring the sort of quiet, guiding phrases Ma had always used to help him fend off asthma attacks. Once outside the townhouse holding the Museum of Modern Art galleries, Steve looks with some despair toward the Metro stop at the end of the block. They’ll get there, but slowly. 

“I want to tell you about your father,” Ma says, when they’re about halfway down the block. She hasn’t said much since they were in the gallery, and Steve hadn’t known what to ask. He felt, looking at those images of tortured suffering, an ache — a call. That kind of pain didn’t stop just because the war was two decades done. He read the news; he saw what was happening in Spain, in Germany, in India, the rumbles of rumors from the Soviet Union and from French colonies in North Africa. Sometimes he thinks the only thing that persists is an immense capability for inflicting pain. 

“I want to hear about him,” he says, honestly. He doesn’t know much: a wartime romance, a photo of a stern-jawed man in Army uniform, the worn gold ring Ma wears and the wedding she doesn’t mention. “When we get home, yeah?” He clasps her hand, squeezing it in reassurance, and they make their way down the block.

When they get home, Ma is too tired to talk and goes to bed early, refusing the hot lemon tea he offers to make. Two days later, he wakes up to find the house too quiet, and Ma’s breathing gone still.

+++++

September 1937, Munich, Germany

The queue snakes around the square, hundreds of people waiting to file neatly into the Residenz to take a glance at all the things they’re being told to hate. They’ll dutifully spit and despair, good German citizens all. Gabriele pulls her jacket a little closer around her, against both the weak September drizzle and the over-loud, over-confident voices of all those around her. So eager to fall in line, to produce their disgust at the Führer’s command. 

She’s on her own today. Johannes would have come if she had asked, but she needs to see her old friends without him. He’s always been a bit jealous of Wassily, too, though he’d never voice it. It’s not unreasonable; that time of her life is outsized, a presence that surrounds her in the paintings on her walls and the memories in her body. Possibilities and hopes and color, such color, on canvas and glass and the beds of her nails. She didn’t paint for a decade, after Wassily went back to Russia, after Franz died on French soil. Johannes helped; color bloomed in her again because of his touch. 

The queue shifts forward — the doors must have opened. If she’d hoped for some quiet morning moments alone with those reminders of her friends, she’s sorely underestimated the popularity of the exhibition. It’s been up for months now, all anyone can talk about in what remains of the art world. Well, perhaps she’s being harsh — there are, of course, some artists all-too-eager to cast off modernism in favor the stodgy landscapes and stolid peasants that appeal to the Reich, and to profit accordingly. Her own work is no longer favored. She’d sold some things abroad last year, and has a few more canvases stacked up to send off to Paris, but that all feels very uncertain now. Her dealer, Paul, tells her to wait a bit longer while he disentangles the paperwork, for the Reich is fond of its bureaucracy. 

She’s almost at the door now. She’s been here before; this section of the Residenz houses the Archaeological Institute, and she dimly remembers rows of plaster casts of ancient masterpieces seen through the bored eyes of a little girl. They’ve been shoved aside, the space filled with modern works confiscated from all the German public museums. Above the door, a hastily-produced sign in a ghastly blackletter proclaims it the Austellung “Entartete Kunst” — the exhibition of degenerate art.

As she waits in the shadow of the building, she wonders if the true believers, the folks who will gaze upon the riotous color and bold brushstrokes of her expressionist friends and proclaim it degenerate, lacking moral value, if they know they’re only the latest in a long history of idiots. Tiny drops in a bucket of fools who think that anything new, anything that expresses the sublime dissatisfaction with the existing tools of the world and seeks to make new ones, is a sign of moral corruption. 

The door opens to let in another group, and suddenly Gabriele is inside. The horde moves toward the stairs, where the exhibition starts, but something in her leads her, instead, to the small rooms off the lobby, which hold dimly-lit vitrines and a jumble of poorly-hung paintings. They’re shoved together, with no-doubt deliberate carelessness, frames abutted in some places, arranged with uneven gaps in others. One painting’s corner juts into the arch of the doorway, waiting to be knocked by the shoulder of some strident visitor. 

It doesn’t take her long to find Wassily; he’s there, tucked under some bathers, in the form of a small cruciform study. A later work, done after they’d stopped knowing one another, after Wassily had returned to Russia, to his wife, but she knows it. She’d followed his work — it would be difficult not to, of course — and she can see his hand immediately, can see the lingering influence of the tiny glass peasant paintings they’d both studied so closely in the layering of form. 

She doesn’t linger. There’s a lot to see, after all: portraits, landscapes, interiors, all with little in common other than a tendency toward style, an exaggeration of facial features here, a geometric use of spatiality there, brushwork left suggestive or thick across many of the canvases. For the Reich only wants clarity, and strength, and single point perspective. None of this emotionality, none of this inner spirit nonsense. 

In the next room, prints are push pinned or taped to walls, laid out under glass seemingly at random. There’s a set of prints by Otto Dix — she knew him, briefly, in Berlin. Her own work, she knew well enough, was too romantic for his tastes, the portraits she painted of her friends, the quiet studies of her own experiences of life lacking the forceful, ruthless matter-of-factness of his war veterans and bloody realism. They’re crowded together in a vitrine, as though overlapping the edges haphazardly will blunt the impact of their jagged lines and gruesome subject. Of course the Reich has torn away his images and cast them down here in the basement, with his friend Groesz and their shared horrors; it’s hard to recruit for a new army with the damned bloody uselessness of the last war staring good, fine citizens in the face. Much better to ply them with images of strong, golden-haired boys. 

The doors at the end of the room are barred, and she can only come back the way she came, walk back through that careless gauntlet of battered-together works to ascend the stairs and see the exhibition, proper. She knows what to expect, having talked extensively about the seizure of works and their display in this ghastly exhibit in every art circle gathering she’s attended for months. Still, when she steps in, assaulted by not just the sheer volume of works — all those things in German collections deemed the very worst, the most degenerate — but the text scrawled, graffito-like, across the gallery walls mocking it, declaring the works horrors and the artists incompetents, she staggers, falling back a half-step before righting herself.

It’s like a physical thing, the weight of responsibility she feels. A heft, bulky on her shoulders, that makes her every step dragging and difficult. But she must: she has vowed to walk through every gallery, to look intently at every painting and sculpture, to see it. To remember. There are some who maintain that this is a momentary outrage, one of dozens that have and will happen through history, and that it will be forgotten tomorrow, the works sent back and re-hung in their home museums and artists left alone once more. She’s not so sure. 

She remembers the fuss over Franz’s beautiful blue horses, his shining tower, which had been removed from the exhibition when his fellow cavalrymen had protested. He was a war hero, they argued, awarded an Iron Cross for his heroic death in Verdun. A death she had mourned, a war that nearly made her set aside her paints for good. The _Tower_ had been removed, but it had not been returned to the National Gallery, and two other paintings by him remained, on walls emblazoned with insults.

She overhears snippets of conversation as she weaves through the crowds: a man who recognizes a work from the State Museum in Dresden; a couple disgusted by Nolde’s roughly-hewn nudes; a child delighted by the blue house in a Kirchner painting, his mother attempting vainly to hush him. “They should just burn them all,” a man near her says. She flinches away, but his voice rises higher. “They have them all gathered here; they should just burn the lot.”

“Light the building on fire,” his companion agreed, her voice reedy and sharp. 

“The difficulty is, there are a lot more,” a man nearby chimes in. “This is just the stuff from the State collections — what about all the so-called connoisseurs who collect this trash?” The other two nod seriously; Gabrielle’s stomach clenches, hard. 

They might burn them. The Reich and its fanatics have already burned books, great piled bonfires of texts by Jews, communists, homosexuals. There’s nothing about canvas and oil that renders it safer than paper and ink. And there’s nothing that means that her little home, far out in the wheat fields of Murnau, is any safer than the great State museums in Berlin, Munich, Hamberg. Her walls, covered in works by her many friends, are no safer than these walls around her. 

She’ll hide them, she thinks. Put them in crates and tuck them away in the dark corners of the cellar and attic. She’ll hide them. She’ll save them.

+++++

November 1938, Art Students League, New York

Steve sweeps his charcoal over the outer curve of the apple again, darkening it where its pink luster turns deeper red. The stem he marks in with one quick flick, trying a looser hand than usual. In the same spirit, he tries a couple of loose ovals to capture the nickels and pennies to its side. Today’s motley still life comprises treasures from his classmates’ pockets and bags: an apple, bruise turned toward the center, with a haphazard pile of coins next to it; a pocket knife with a gleaming mother-of-pearl inlay; a spare pair of stockings in a crumpled little pile like the shed skin of a snake; his own set of keys, looped on the heavy brass ring Bucky’d won at Coney Island when they were twelve and fourteen, that summer when Steve had started to notice the warm gold gleam of Bucky’s skin; a half-chewed pack of Wrigley’s, spearmint; two pencils of different lengths; and this month’s copy of _New Masses,_ tucked under the other objects so that just _asses_ shows. Steve’s sure that’s Benjamin’s addition to the composition. 

The stockings are harder to capture, lacking any hard edges, and Steve’s attempt looks remarkably like the melted dog shit that adorns Brooklyn sidewalks in the heat of the summer. As he works at the shadows their wrinkles cause, he can feel his mind start to drift away, an insistent tugging pulling his attention to the laundry he should do when he gets home. Both of their smalls from the week, a handful of shirts. He ought to renew his attention to that stain on his one good tie before church on Sunday. And they’re nearly out of laundry flakes, so he’d best put that on the shopping list for next time Bucky goes, along with the Vaseline they use for all manner of scrapes and pleasures and the usual eggs and bread. He’ll have to remind Bucky that meat isn’t in the budget this week, not beef at least. Tongue would be okay, or liver. 

Steve wipes his hand across his forehead, remembering too late the charcoal smeared on his fingers. This term at the League is almost up, too; he’s wrapping up Still Life and was looking at taking the portrait sculpture class with Stevenson next, but funds are tight and he’s not sure if he’ll have enough together to pay the fee by registration. He’s got money coming from the Driscoll’s bakery project as soon as it’s finished up, and a list of half-a-dozen other stores he’s planning to approach to see if they’d like freshly painted signs next. It’s quiet but reliable business, so long as he sticks to the sort of shops not likely to want to switch from hand-painted signs to the new neon lights anytime soon. Lenny’s been making noise about applying for some of those new schemes the government’s been supporting, but word has it that it’s hard to get on the rolls. Lenny said Babe went out with a gal who works as an assistant on a project in Queens, but Steve’s not terribly convinced that’s a reliable lead. Saying Babe _went out_ in the past tense rarely bodes well; Babe has gone out with most of the lesbians in Brooklyn and only about a third of them still speak to her. 

His rendition of the spare stockings looks, somehow, even worse. Steve gives it up as a bad job and moves on to sketching the broad outline of the pocket knife. It belongs to Arnold, no doubt one of many such inlaid and monogrammed trinkets he owns. He comes down from Manhattan for class, a side hobby to his half-hearted participation in his family’s company. Stocks, or banking, or insurance; something insufferable, but Arnie plays his role as guileless bourgeois well, listening with wide and eager eyes to the heated debates around government policy and state of art in Russia and the war in Spain and the need for rebellion in various and sundry colonized countries that occur at nearly any post-class gathering. They’ll probably go out tonight — Margo had already been making noise about drinks before class started — but Steve’ll head on home. He doesn’t have much to spare for a beer today, and he’s still getting past a nasty, lingering cough that means the smoke-filled booths of Filmore’s are probably a bad idea.

Margo leans over, bumping shoulders with Steve. “You’re off your game, Rogers,” she says, with her characteristic candor. “The angle’s all wrong here,” she adds, gesturing to the space between the apple and knife. It is wrong, askew enough that the knife looks lopsided. 

“I must be distracted,” he says. Around him, others have started packing up, stretching their shoulders and flipping sketchbooks closed. His work is unfinished, barely more than an incomplete sketch, while next to him Margo has worked out the whole display, Steve’s keys delicately worked next to the crumpled end of Martin’s pack of gum. She raises her eyebrows at him, communicating that they both know inattention is unlike him. These classes are a sacrifice for him and Bucky, just as they were for Ma before that, and Steve does not take that lightly. 

“Come and have a drink, clear your head?” she asks, tucking her box of charcoals away in her satchel. 

Steve shakes his head, “Nah,” he says, giving the excuse he’d already worked out. “Gotta work on a sign commission tonight.” It’s true; he’ll likely be up late finishing the proposal sketches before he drops by Driscoll’s tomorrow. He doesn’t like to say that he can’t afford it, though it’s the truth. Couple of other fellas in the class come from his neighborhood, or near enough, and know what it’s like to scrimp to make rent and buy paper, too, but none of them also have to keep up with medicines and make sure there’s a little nest egg tucked away in case winter brings the influenza again. 

“Next time, yeah?” Margo says, picking up Steve’s keys from the pile and tossing them to him. They land heavily in his cupped hands, the well-worn brass of Bucky’s ring familiar. 

“Sure,” he agrees, closing his bag over the top of his sketchbook. Arnie, sitting to Steve’s right, taps him on the elbow as Steve stands to leave. When he turns, Arnie’s holding out the _New Masses_ magazine, having used the corner to get his attention.

“I’ve read it,” he says, smile bright and eager like the communist magazine is just another textbook that he’s doing a good job of mastering. He does so want to fit in. “You want it?” 

Steve opens his mouth to refuse, then doesn’t, instead accepting the magazine and holding it awkwardly in one hand. “Thanks,” he says; it’s one he hasn’t read yet and he’d resigned himself to caging a copy off someone at the next AAC meeting. The cover has a burly, striding worker wielding a shovel like a weapon and the magazine’s familiar exhortation to the unification of the workers of the world. The lines of the image are direct, clean; Steve has been experimenting with linocuts when he can and his still come out choppy, edges feathered by the carving tools. He’s seeing it more, this clarity of line, and he’d like to see what he can do with it.

He parts ways with the rest of the group at the entrance to the building, heading toward the nearest subway station. It’s a long loop to Brooklyn through the East River Tunnel, so he’s glad to have something to read. 

++

Shouldering the door open, Steve reads the last couple of lines of the report on the war in Spain in _New Masses._ The correspondent seems predominantly concerned with painting every defeat suffered by the Spanish Republican forces as a mere stumbling block in the great narrative of underdog revolutions. Revolutions in America, in Russia, in Ireland succeeded against all odds, and so too will that in Spain, it seems to suggest. The news tells them there’s no freedom left in Russia, not with Stalin ousting anyone who opposes him. Ireland’s decided it likes Catholicism more than the rights of the laborers or women, and Steve’s spent enough time at Mass to know where that will lead. 

“The glories of the fucking past,” he says to the apartment as he turns the latch behind him. Bucky’s boots are on the mat, the top of his head visible where he’s slouched on the sofa. “That’s all they can talk about. That’s not gonna convince anyone, and meanwhile here we are, standing by and watching as fascism takes over _another_ country.” The number of times he’s heard someone say that it’s not _our_ business, not _our_ concern, if Germany and Italy and Spain get themselves turned into fascists — the politicians on the radio, and the grocer on the corner that they’ve since stopped going to, even though the next closest one is five more blocks and a nickel pricier, and even plenty of the other students at the League, the cautious aesthetes who are happy enough if everyone minds their own business. And here are the communists, content to say that glory will prevail. The same old stories, as though they didn’t know it was time for new ones. 

“What’s got you all het up today?” Bucky says, not bothering to move. There’s a fondness in his voice; even in his ire and his worry, Steve hears it. 

Dropping the magazine on Bucky’s lap, Steve steps into the kitchen to fill the kettle. It’s late, but if he’s to finish the sketches for the new sign for Mrs. Driscoll’s bakery, he’ll need coffee. “The fucking war in Spain,” he says, as Bucky skims through the article. He hums noncommittally at the end, and Steve starts to open his mouth when Bucky tilts his head back to look at him over the back of the sofa.

“I think the communists are going about this recruitment thing all wrong,” Bucky says. He flips the magazine closed and picks it up, tilts his head to look at the cover. The striking dark lines of the wood engraving catch the eye, moving dynamically across the page. Without even seeing his expression, Steve can guess what Bucky’s gaze lingers over: the strongly muscled thighs and forearms of a proletariat worker, shovel raised in defense against the bayonets of his adversaries. “I think more people would join the movement if all the workers were this handsome,” Bucky says, cracking an upside-down grin at Steve over the back of the sofa. It’s a blatant attempt to defuse Steve’s mood, and it works. Steve bares his teeth, leans over Bucky’s shoulder to pluck the magazine from his hand. 

“Angling for a compliment, comrade?” That close, Steve smells the soap-clean scrub of Bucky’s neck and the vanilla waft of his pomade. He works mornings at the factory and comes home smelling of steel and oil. Steve wouldn’t mind if he didn’t clean up, likes to breathe in the sweaty reek of his day, but Bucky prefers to be slick and clean, always has. Rightly preens in the mirror if they go out, checking that his hair is combed just so and his collar buttoned sharp. 

Bucky flutters his lashes, feigning demure. “I’m only saying,” he says. “A pretty face can convince a fella of an awful lot.” 

Steve screws up his mouth a little. “I’m right, you know,” he says. Bucky cranes up to kiss him; Steve teasingly lifts his chin so his mouth is just out of reach. 

“Course you are, punk,” Bucky says, before shoving up to catch his mouth, ungainly and off-center, in a wet, fond kiss. 

Steve responds, can’t help but respond, to the warm familiarity of Bucky’s mouth, leaning into it until Bucky’s pressed against the back of the sofa. When he pulls away, Bucky grins up at him, mouth spit-slick and pleased, and says, “Wanna neck a little before supper?” His thighs are spread open, comfortably, and the buttons at the neck of his undershirt undone. Before Steve can answer, his stomach growls loudly. Bucky laughs. “Guess that answers that. Potato soup alright?” he asks, shoving up off the sofa. 

Steve tips up one shoulder, rubs at his stomach a little ruefully. “Yeah, sounds good. We still got some of your Ma’s bread?” Mrs. Barnes sends them home with a loaf after every Sunday dinner, and by Thursday or Friday they’re usually down to crusts, a little dried out and perfect for dipping in soup. Walking over to the breadbox himself, Steve answers his own question by flipping open the top and pulling out the last bit, tearing off a chunk to tide him over. He reaches for a couple of potatoes while Bucky starts to chop up an onion. They’ve sprouted eyes and feel a little soft, but Steve gives them a good scrub and starts to peel them, revealing perfectly good white flesh underneath. 

Together, they get enough tossed together in a stockpot that the soup will probably be palatable. As he closes the lid and leaves it to simmer away, Bucky lifts one eyebrow at Steve, a question without words. “Yeah, alright,” Steve says, amiably, his mood fully dissipated by the scent of onions rising and the settled comfort of their bodies moving together in the kitchen. 

They settle on the sofa together, its cushions worn comfortable with the memory of their bodies just so, and lazily pet while the soup simmers quietly in the background. For a few long moments, the world narrows down to the feeling of Bucky’s chest against his, the warm-sour smell of his breath, and the idle flutter of the lace curtains at the window.

+++++

May 1939, Third Annual American Artists’ Congress, Hotel Commodore, New York City

“You have _got_ to be fucking kidding me,” Steve says, not nearly under his breath enough. Next to him, Babe snorts and doesn’t disagree. He’s not the only one angry; the speaker’s words are almost drowned out by the buzz sweeping through the room. Pounding one hand against the podium, the speaker, a curator from one of the lesser museums in Boston whose name Steve has already forgotten, raises his voice, trying to reclaim the room, and behind him the Congress committee shifts uncomfortably. 

“We must at least consider —” the speaker continues, his entreaty drowned out by a man who stands up to shout — “Eat your own hat, Phillips!” Phillips blusters, leaning against the podium so it shifts, screeching against the stage floor. 

“Let him speak,” Pearson, one of the members of the Congress committee, says, raising his voice to be heard above the din. “We have to consider all angles before adopting a position.” In theory, Steve would agree; in practice, the curator has just spent a very boring ten minutes leading up to the conclusion that the AAC, a congress founded on the express principle of anti-fascism in the arts, should support US non-involvement in the case of war being declared in Europe. It’s fucking unconscionable. 

The proceedings all day have been tense. It’s only Steve’s second year attending; last year he heard Margaret Bourke-White speak on her New Deal work in the West and Aaron Douglas against race discrimination in revolutionary art, coming away feeling the vital promise of art’s ability to communicate new thoughts. This year, the committee made the dubious choice to begin with opening statements condemning Stalin and, by implication, anyone in the Congress who continued to support the American Communist Party’s agenda followed by, now, Phillips declaring that the Congress should not push for U.S. involvement if Germany or the USSR make moves to invade their neighbors. 

“This is ridiculous,” he says, half to Babe and Lenny and half to the room at large. “This was founded as a political organization. Now we’re saying —”

“Meyer says they’re looking to run all the commies out,” Lenny says, leaning over Babe to look at Steve. “All those good Protestant boys don’t want the taint in case the U.S. goes fascist, too.” Meyer’s an up-and-comer at Columbia and on the AAC board, and he goes to shul with Len and Babe’s Ma in Brooklyn. He’d know — and he’d probably be spiting mad about it.

“Is he here?”

Lenny shakes his head. “Teaching. Don’t know if they’d be so bold if he were up there with them.”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “We can’t just sit here —”

“You don’t have to convince us,” Babe interrupts, gesturing to the crowd. On stage, Davis, the Congress president, has stood up, and seems to be trying to regulate the chaos by calling for questions — “ _Orderly_ questions,” he shouts. He looks miserable; Steve’s only met him once, last year, but he’s a founding member, a believer in the cause against fascism. The din calms, a little, and as Davis’s eyes roam the crowd for a likely candidate, Steve shoots to his feet.

He tries to keep a placid expression on his face as he lifts his hand to speak, but it’s a struggle. Nonetheless, Davis points to him, seeming with relief at someone not simply shouting out their opinion, and Steve lowers his hand and tries to summon a bit of bellow to his voice.

“I’m not —” he starts, and no one quiets down. “Hey!” he shouts. It has the desired effect, and suddenly most of the eyes in the room are on him. Swallowing, he continues. “I’m not the only one who went to see Picasso’s work yesterday,” he says, thinking of the press of the crowds wanting to catch a glimpse of the magnificent _Guernica_ , on view in New York for only a week. “I know I’m not the only one who found it powerful.” Some viewers had come away in tears, others in anger. Steve knows that plenty of critics — published and armchair alike — believe that, with photography showing the world just as it is, art no longer has the ability to capture the rawness of the world. Some even say that seeing images of pain, hunger, and degradation in the press regularly means that humanity has become more inured to the suffering of others. Steve doesn’t believe that — can’t believe that — and seeing complete strangers fall to tears at the overwhelming chaos of Picasso’s piece is enough to reinforce it for him.

“We’re all here because we figure artists have to be involved in our world — that we can’t just sit back and observe. We’re all here because three years ago some of the people in this room figured they’d better stand up and say that we have a responsibility to oppose fascism, even as artists — especially as artists. I can’t stand here while members of this Congress say it’s not our responsibility, that it’s someone else’s, as though we don’t live in this world. I might be the only one, but I’m willing to bet I’m not.” Steve paused, breath feeling a little short. The room is quiet for a moment, then some isolated cheers go up, then more, as Steve falls back into his seat. Someone else stands up, agreeing, and Phillips weakly thumps his fist against the podium, glaring in Steve’s general direction while calling for order. 

++

“I can’t believe you got in a fight at an artists’ meeting,” Bucky says, peering at Steve’s forehead, where a hot trickle of blood flows down from his temple. He dabs at it with a handkerchief; it stings a little, but not much, because Bucky’s had plenty of practice. 

“They deserved it,” Steve says. It comes out mumbled; his mouth is swollen and full of coppery spit. Bucky lifts one eyebrow, not convinced. And, well, Steve will admit this isn’t how he planned the afternoon to happen: Bucky was to meet them at the end of the meeting so they could all go for a drink, them and Lenny and Babe, and get smashed while Bucky good-naturedly listens to them gripe about everything that happened in the meeting. At least Bucky knows to check surrounding alleys when he can’t find Steve on time, Steve thinks, wincing as Bucky pushes a little harder than necessary on his bruised jaw.

“They really did,” Babe backs him up. The bruise around her eye is going to be spectacular tomorrow. Bucky pauses in glaring at Steve to glare at Babe, who blinks placidly back, unperturbed. Narrowing his eyes, Bucky fishes in his pocket for another handkerchief and hands it to Babe, gesturing at her split lip. 

“I hate you both,” Lenny says from the ground, elbows on his knees and dirt streaked up one side where he’d fallen. Steve does feel guilty for that. Len had never quite learned to take a punch, not like Steve and Babe both have, despite being the sort of sweet-faced queer who’s too often the target of them. He’s an optimist, is Len. Babe bends over her brother, tips his chin up to look at her, searches his face. He’s unbloodied; Steve thinks he was maybe shoved over early on in the fight, by the burly man in the navy suit who thoughts art should be free of all politics. Steve knows he’s run across him before, has seen his uninspired and over-large landscapes at an opening somewhere or other.

“Should I even ask what it was about?” Bucky says, stepping away from Steve, apparently satisfied that he’s ascertained all his injuries. Babe helps haul Len up off the ground, who vigorously and with obvious displeasure brushes off his suit trousers. The suit is a remarkable shade of purple, and Len is fastidious. When he’s done — or simply resigned to his state, at least — Babe hands him his cane, which had clattered to the ground with him. “Not the same fuss over social realism as last year, was it?” Last year hadn’t come to blows at all, just a bit of enthused shouting in the lobby after the main meeting. 

Today needn’t have either; once the count came in that the majority members of the AAC had voted in favor of the Congress declaring support for US neutrality in the case that war is declared in Europe after all, Steve had been fit to wash his hands entirely of the Congress, rescinding his membership and cursing them for fools. The fellas who had followed them outside had different ideas. 

It’s Lenny who answers, on their side still, of course; Steve hadn’t doubted him. “It seems that they agreed with the Germans, that the art world is simply too suffused with — what was it? — Jews, Bolsheviks, and fags. It’s quite beyond me how they came to that impression,” he adds, with a wry gesture at the group of them. 

“Apparently they were just doing their part to rid the world of degenerates,” Babe adds, with mock sincerity. “It’s too bad we got in their way.” 

Bucky shakes his head, but Steve knows if he’d been here he’d contributed a fair few hits. Well, more than the rest of them, likely; he’s the only one with a welterweight championship under his belt, even if it’s a few years old. “Tell me you got a few hits in,” he says. He slings his arm around Steve’s shoulders as they make their way out of the alley, a heavy, comfortable weight. Babe holds up her hands, with their rows of split knuckles, and grins. It starts her split lip bleeding again. “Jesus,” Bucky says. “Let’s get some fucking drinks in you.”

+++++

August 1939, Road out of Paris, France

Maman looks up at the sky, again and again. As the truck turns along the twists in the bumpy road, the great canvas behind them sometimes blocks out the barely-risen sun. Marie shivers; she is wearing her winter coat, and her heavy woolen sweater, the one that itches, and her beret and her scarf and her rainboots, but they have been in the back of the truck since before the sun was up, and it is cold. “Maman, what are you looking for?” Marie says, when Maman’s chin tips upward again. All around them, on the road and spilling into the ditches, people trudge, carrying suitcases and looking down at their feet. The whole of Paris is trying to leave.

Maman turns her face downward, clasps Marie’s hands in her own. “Nothing, my dear. Just hoping it won’t rain.” She looks over her shoulder, at the huge painting behind them. Unlike some of the others, nestled in the sides of the truck and on those in front and behind them, it is too big for a crate. There are blankets tossed over the top; the stretched canvas frame wobbles at each pothole in the road.

“It wouldn’t be good for Liberty,” Marie agrees. The woman in the painting is one of her favorites, and she is glad to be on the same truck with it. Amelie’s papa has had to stay behind with the Medusa, because it is too big for the trucks, and so Amelie is on the truck with the Greek vases, which are boring. Maman and Papa will be in charge of _Liberty Leading the People,_ Marie’s favorite, and the Rubens and four Titians, and a box full of portraits and still lifes. Maman has helped her memorize it, the whole long list of everything that will go with them to the Chateau until the Germans leave, but made her promise not to tell anyone at all.

“It’s only in case,” she had said, but when Marie had asked in case of what, Maman had pursed her lips, the way she does when she is thinking, and said, “In case we’re separated. When it’s time for the paintings to go back.”

“None of this is good for liberty,” Maman says, clutching a little harder to Marie’s hand. It hurts, a little, but Marie doesn’t cry out. 

“We’ll take care of her,” Marie says, scooting over to curl up under Maman’s arm. Behind her, she thinks about Liberty with her upraised arm, and all the people who follow her. Most days after school Marie comes to the museum while Maman works, and her favorite thing to do is to sit on the bench in the Grand Gallery and stare up at her. At school, her classmates don’t like her, and her best friend Amelie is older so they only see each other outside of school, sometimes at the museum. Marie wonders what it would be like to have people follow her. She feels afraid a lot, especially now; Liberty doesn’t look like she’s afraid. 

She won’t be going back to school, now. In her bag are her clothes, a pair of shoes she hasn’t yet grown into, a dozen school books, and Miele, her stuffed bear. Maman carries a bag, too, but there is still so much they left behind: her favorite chair, the one she and Papa curl up in to read at night before bed; the shelves and shelves of books that line one whole wall of their apartment, full of glorious pictures of beautiful things; the pretty white gown Marie was to wear to her first communion next month. “It’s very important, what we’re doing,” Papa had said. Important enough to interrupt their lives.

Liberty doesn’t wear much, anyway; she probably wouldn’t mourn over not getting to wear a perfect white lace dress. She and Amelie used to take turns being the characters in their favorite paintings, tugging open the buttons on their dresses and screeching as they entered the fray of battle — an assembled blockade of their least-favorite stuffed animals — with their fellow rebels — the more favored toys — behind them. She thinks she can be brave.

+++++

September 1939, Most Holy Trinity Cemetery, Brooklyn

The flowers have slowly dwindled as the past two years took their course. In that first long winter, every time Steve stopped by the headstone, his meager offerings had never been the first, single hot-house roses and the last wilted chrysanthemums of the season evidence of the many who’d loved her, the many whom she’d cared for and helped and loved. 

Today, there’s nothing. The grave is neat, grass clipped and weeds pulled by the elderly church volunteers who tend Most Holy Trinity. He’s brought a postcard today, instead of flowers: a print of the grand stampeding horses by Bonheur, one of Ma’s favorites in the Met. “Sometimes it doesn’t take much,” she’d told him, gazing up at the muscled beasts, flanks gleaming in the gallery light. “Just us, and nature, and a sense of awe.” 

He props the card against her headstone, digging a little trench in the dirt so it will stay upright. Sitting on the ground next to the plot, he crosses his legs and heaves a sigh. The autumn chill seeps through his trousers, but he’ll be okay here for a little while. 

He doesn’t speak; that’s not usually why he visits. Instead, he closes his eyes, feels the prickle of grass against his palm, lets himself notice the smell of cut grass, slowly drying, and turned-over dirt, and stone. There aren’t a lot of quiet places in the city. He doesn’t mind — can’t really think what it would be like to live anywhere else — but here, with the dead, is a good place to notice the stuff usually drowned out by the noisy clash of human lives. 

A soft breeze; the call of a bird; the shape of dirt settled for two years now; the creeping lichen on the side of the granite block. Most of the stones in this section are like Ma’s: simple blocks with bare inscriptions. Enough. Not far away, though, are earlier plots, with clusters of ornate stone and cast metal statues. Angels with broad-spread wings, soldiers with somberly-held muskets. Not a few grandiose obelisks, atop pedestals carved with scripture, a strange tangle of symbol and word. In further corners still, in the oldest parts of the cemetery, crooked stone crosses stand amid towering trees. Pitted gravestones marked with moss, names worn by weather and time. Is that sufficient, he wonders: a hewn stone that shows your human presence, that shows that once, if no longer, you were known and perhaps loved? 

After a time, Bucky arrives to settle down on the ground next to him. He says nothing, just sits and lets their arms brush together, their breathing settle as one. He’ll have brought flowers, for he is astoundingly good at scrounging up beautiful, impossible things, even as the air gets chill and the ground hard. There’s a spot of oil on Bucky’s trouser knee that he’ll scrub out in the sink tonight, and for dinner they’ll eat something ordinary, for Steve can’t bear to feel like he needs special treatment on the anniversary. 

Letting out a deep breath, he turns to look at Bucky, who holds a bouquet of mums. When he looks at Steve, there’s a glimmer of wet in the corner of his eye. Steve can’t help but lean in, grazing his mouth in a bare kiss over the soft curve of Bucky’s neck exposed above his collar. Sometimes it doesn’t take much, he thinks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you ever so much for reading, and please look out for the next two chapters in the coming days! 
> 
> There is a growing breadth of scholarship on the issue of art pillaging and repatriation during WWII. If you’re interested in learning more, I would direct you to _The Rape of Europa_ , both the documentary and the book on which it is based, by Lynn Nichels. For more on the Monuments Men, Robert M. Edsel has literally written the key texts, including _The Monuments Men_ and _Saving Italy_. 
> 
> Please look out for the final chapter on Tuesday which will contain lengthy endnotes of the most pertinent and interesting historical and art historical details. If you’re wanting more info on any of the arty stuff mentioned, just drop me a comment!


	2. Part 2

January 1940, Columbia University History of Art Department, New York

Steve tries not to pace. The hallway containing the art history faculty offices is narrow and holds no chairs or benches, just a dingy water fountain and a bulletin board holding typed announcements for lectures, both upcoming and long past, stapled up in archaeological layers. He’s early, having never been to Columbia and therefore uncertain of how long it would take to find Schermerhorn Hall, and Professor Mansfield’s door is closed tight, murmuring voices just audible behind it. Running his finger underneath the tight upper button of his shirt collar, Steve swallows and tries to breathe normally. His father’s suit swims on him, he knows, but his shirt fits well enough, if unfamiliarly, and his shoes are shined up well. 

Mansfield’s door opens. Two men come out; Steve sees their shoes first, looking down at the floor before his gaze is startled upward. A pair of gleaming brogues met by crisp wool trousers in deep blue, and a slightly more downtrodden pair of oxfords in black, a greyish ring around the soles a memento of the winter’s salted sidewalks. The man in the nice brogues, who wears, improbably, a sweater in deepest green under a crisp tweed blazer, seeming more like he’s stepped out of the halls of Oxford than New York’s Columbia, is about Steve’s age, and handsome. His gaze slides past Steve as he turns to shake the other man’s hand once more, with a comfortable laugh.

As he leaves, Steve finally catches the attention of the man who must be Professor Mansfield. He gives Steve a look, brow slightly furrowed under round glasses, and says, “You’re not in my medieval iconography seminar.” 

“No,” Steve says, feeling caught out. “I’m — Steve Rogers?” He says it like a question, hand twitching as he makes the decision not to thrust it out for a shake, but luckily Mansfield’s expression clears at once.

“Of course,” he says. “Sammy’s student. Come on in.”

His office is spacious compared to the few and fought-over shared faculty offices at the Art Students League, but filled to stuffed with books. One narrow window overlooks a grey-stone quad where flurried snowflakes have begun once more to fall. 

“Sammy says you have a remarkable memory,” Mansfield says once Steve is seated. Steve nods, resisting the urge to shrug up his shoulders to mitigate the crawling sense of a boast. It is, after all, why Professor Rosenthal recommended Steve to Mansfield, the fact that he’s always been able to remember just about anything he puts before his eyes. “He also says you’d be a good student if you managed to stay out of trouble more often.”

At that, Steve colors up a bit. It’s not an unfamiliar charge; he’s been hearing it from the lips of nuns since he was yea high, but it still smarts a little to hear it again, a grown adult. “If I see a situation headed south, I can’t help but step in,” he says, truthfully. Mansfield regards him for a long moment, then smiles, the side of his mouth tipping up asymmetrically.

“I don’t care much about all that,” he says. “As long as you get the job done, clean, I don’t care what you do in between.” 

“Yes, sir,” Steve says. That’s the other reason Professor Rosenthal had thought of him; he’d said that Mansfield needed indexing on his new book done, and that he could do it from just about anywhere. Normally Steve would bristle a little at the suggestion that he can’t get himself into work every day like every other working man in the city, but he’s missed a third of his classes this winter due to ‘flu and asthma, and if he can make a dime tucked snug in the apartment he won’t say no. 

“You aiming to be an art historian?” Mansfield twiddles with a pen while they talk, like his energy isn’t totally there, needing a little escape. He’s in his forties, maybe, based on the gray at his temples, but his energy makes him seem younger.

“An artist, sir.” He’s still dedicated to the act of creating, even though Professor Rosenthal’s class on Realism is about the most interesting course he’s in at the moment. 

“Ah, well, I won’t hold that against you,” Mansfield says, very gravely, then gives a sharp, barking laugh completely out of place in the somber little office. He leans forward a little, tip of the twiddling pen tapping against the surface of the desk. “Honestly, the job’s yours if you want it. I’d usually give it to a grad student, but my research stipend is shit so it won’t pay much, and we’re short-handed at the moment.”

Mansfield looks at Steve contemplatively. There’s a long, somber beat, silent as Mansfield’s tapping pen stills and he seems hazy in his own thoughts for a moment. Finally, he says, “Right —” and sits up, rummaging through a stack of papers on his desk before pulling out a thick manila folder. “Here’s the first chapter, and a preliminary list of terms to index. Know anything about 12th century Byzantine icons in Venice?”

Steve takes the folder, shakes his head.

“Ah, well, you and the rest of the world. If you have questions, just ask. Shall we plan to meet this time next week, to see how you’re getting on?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Walt. Walter, really, but folks call me Walt.”

“Walt,” Steve agrees, tucking the chapter into his satchel. Mansfield — Walt — stands up as he does, holds out a hand to shake. His fingers are surprisingly tough for an academic, and his grip makes Steve think again about the wear to Walt’s shoes, the rumpled look of his jacket. It endears him, he thinks, as Walt opens the door for him to leave and gives an awkward but unabashed little wave.

++

Steve can’t say that he’s ever had an opinion on medieval icons before, even as a Catholic. Holy Cross has images of the saints, sure, some paintings, a handful of smallish sculptures, and one prized stained glass window with a slightly cock-eyed Angel Gabriel. There’s a Saint Theresa tucked away in the nook of a side chapel that Steve’s always found to be kinda priggish-looking, not at all like someone who’d held the glory of the Holy Spirit in her own body. None of them are like the ones Mansfield describes, glimmering in gold and rich with pigment. He’s even stuck a handful of photographs in the back of the folder, halftone reproductions unable to capture the varied polychrome surfaces, but in each Steve can make out delicate inlay in enamel and gems, the richness of saints’ robes and angels’ wings setting off deep, soulful eyes made up with the tiniest of brush strokes. 

He’s twelve pages in, penciled list of terms half-abandoned to Mansfield’s descriptive phrases, mind lost somewhere in Byzantine rituals, hazy with incense, when the door clatters open. He comes back to the present to see Bucky hanging his hat on the hook by the door, tossing his jacket over the back of the sofa where he’ll leave it until his customary pre-bedtime hustle to get everything neatened back up and just so before the next day’s work. Steve stretches; the small of his back has gone stiff hunched over Mansfield’s text. 

Coming up behind him, Bucky drops a hand to his shoulder and a kiss to the top of his head. “What are you up to?”

Steve leans back enough to show Bucky a photograph of a stern Madonna and Child. “That job I told you about — with Professor Rosenthal’s grad school buddy? It’s mine, apparently.”

“Huh,” Bucky says, leaning in to pick up the page at the top of the open manuscript. “It’s all Greek to me,” he says, cackling as he drops the page back onto the stack. Steve thinks about elbowing him for that, he really does, but Bucky’s pleased enough with himself. “Great job, though, really,” Bucky says, thumb rubbing affectionately up Steve’s neck. “You’ll do great.” 

Steve leans into Bucky’s hand, tipping back enough to look up at him. He must have stopped to box a little after work; his collar is unbuttoned, askew, and he smells, just faintly, of dried sweat. “Hungry?” he says, to Bucky’s upside-down face. Bucky grins, chin crinkling up softly.

“Starving. You make something for me, dollface?”

“Not a thing,” Steve says, butting his head against Bucky’s stomach. He’s been so caught up he didn’t even think to put something on. 

“It’s good you’re pretty,” Bucky says, leaning down to kiss Steve, their faces meeting upside-down. He pulls away a little, no doubt to put together some chow, but Steve hooks one finger in the gaped-open neck of his shirt and pulls him close again. Bucky’s mouth is soft against his, the end-of-day stubble on his chin rough, and he smells of beer and sweat, and Steve could just consume him and be happy. 

“That hungry?” Steve asks, against Bucky’s licking mouth, and Bucky rumbles against him, a growling little dissent, and starts to fumble open the buttons on Steve’s shirt. 

“Could wait,” Bucky says, pulling Steve’s chair out roughly and coming around to straddle his lap. The chair creaks a little at their combined weight, but it’s held them well enough before, and Steve likes the way Bucky curls down to meet his mouth, the breadth of Bucky’s shoulders overtaking his vision, the heft of his thighs pressing him down, pinning him in place. Steve tugs at the buttons of Bucky’s shirt, getting it open enough to cup his hand around the bare curve of his shoulder, thumb tucked in the soft dip in his clavicle. He presses, just a little, and feels the rumble of Bucky’s groan against his lips. 

Kissing him, Bucky shoves Steve’s shirt off his shoulders, pulls it away from his wrists. He pulls back enough to look at Steve, gaze raking up over his chest where one of Bucky’s hands spreads to hold him in place, thumb just nudging at the edge of his nipple. “You are, you know,” he says, more seriously than Steve expects, and Steve blinks at him, a little thrown off, and says, “I’m what?”

“Pretty,” Bucky says, wide happy grin spreading. Lifting his hands to cup Steve’s jaw, he leans to kiss him, once each on the sweep of his cheekbones, then rubs his thumbs where his lips had been. “You’re — god, sometimes I can’t believe it, looking at you.” 

“Shut up,” Steve says, feeling a flush spread broad across his chest and cheeks, warm and pink. 

“Nah,” Bucky says. “How can I, with this pretty face right here for me?” He sweeps his thumb across Steve’s lower lip. Steve can’t help but drop his mouth open a little, Bucky’s tender touch shocking him right down to his cock. “This real pretty mouth,” Bucky continues, leaning in to kiss Steve, thumb holding his mouth open, the soft inside of his lip exposed to the grazing touch of Bucky’s mouth. The noise Steve makes gets caught up in Bucky’s mouth, pressed hard to his. 

“This _real_ pretty cock,” Bucky says, breath skating against Steve’s mouth where he’s just pulled away enough to speak, hips grinding down into Steve’s lap. 

Steve groans, rocking his hips up to get more contact. Bucky, teasingly, lifts himself away. His grin spreads wide as Steve huffs in complaint. Narrowing his eyes, Steve says, “Why don’t you show me how you like my pretty cock?” 

He loves the way Bucky’s eyes flash wide, shocked for one pleasing moment, and the way his mouth spreads open, slack and sweet, when Steve bosses him around. Rolling his shoulders back, Bucky leans away from Steve, far enough that he can look him up and down, like he’s deciding what to do with him. Steve licks his mouth, ostentatiously, and cants his hips up so the rise of his cock rubs against Bucky’s inner thigh. “Show me,” Steve says again, more forcefully this time. Hands on Steve’s shoulders, Bucky swings one leg off his lap and goes to his knees, tucking himself between Steve’s legs. 

“I will,” he says, “I’ll show you how much I love this cock,” unzipping Steve’s fly, tugging his pants and undershorts down until they’re a tangle at his ankles. Steve’s cock is pink, and rising, and moves with each shallow breath he takes. Leaning in, Bucky grasps it at the base and brings his mouth down, but he doesn’t lick or suck at him, just kisses the head, down the shaft, tender and unbearably soft. The hot brush of his lips is enough to send Steve moaning, and Bucky looks up at him, bottom lip resting against the head of Steve’s cock, and says, “Yeah, sweetheart, let me hear you, don’t be shy,” and brings his mouth, so hot and wet and soft, to cup around the head of Steve’s cock, just holding him in his mouth for a long moment before he starts to move his mouth.

Steve twists his fingers in Bucky’s hair, not guiding him, just holding, and lets Bucky hear the noises he’s wringing out of him. He comes in Bucky’s mouth, hips jerking unsteadily up, and when he’s done Bucky rests his cheek against the inside of Steve’s thigh, pets at the other. “So pretty,” he says, mouth slick and red and eyes fond and he looks up at Steve. Steve cups his cheek, rubs his thumb over Bucky’s swollen lips. Something inside him breaks wide open, a familiar, raw ache, and he finds himself tugging at the open collar of Bucky’s shirt, pulling him to bring their mouths together.

“I love you,” he says, against Bucky’s mouth. Sometimes it’s comfortable, words that affirm something they both already know and hold close, and other times, like now, it’s a revelation. A shock, that he gets to love Bucky, and have him here, half-sprawled across his lap and with the taste of Steve’s come in his mouth and that soft, fond look in his eyes. In their little apartment, comfortable and safe. 

“I love you too,” Bucky says, ambling up to sit on Steve’s lap again, sideways this time, awkward and too big and tucked up in Steve’s arms.

+++++

March 1940, Columbia University Department of Archeology, New York

As Professor Sampson levers off the lid of the crate, a puff of dust escapes, filling the air with the wistful, dry smell of straw and newspaper. With the assistance of the two archeology grad students there — Steve remembers that their names are Matthew and Mark, though he’s not sure which Apostle is which — Sampson removes the lid, setting it to one side. For a moment, they all look at the crate, filled to the brim with pale, dry straw, as though all resisting the urge to thrust their arms in, up to their elbows, and root around. At least that’s what Steve feels: the childish impulse to dig, to tear open presents, to dive in up to his elbows and feel himself surrounded. 

They don’t, though; Matthew and Mark begin to remove the straw in handfuls, placing it more-or-less neatly onto the upturned lid. The loose mound is piled high before they see anything, and even then it’s just the creamy edge of newspaper, not the patina of bronze. Beside him, Walt bounces up and down on his toes, bumping Steve’s shoulder. When Steve looks over, Walt grins at him in obvious excitement, and Steve can’t help but grin back. It’s by Walt’s invitation that he’s there, witnessing the unwrapping of a new donation to the joint Archeology-Art History study gallery. 

He’s growing fond of Walt. Their weekly meetings have expanded from checking in regarding Steve’s indexing, including the meticulous lists of questions he keeps on terms or names he’s unsure of, into long conversations about anything and everything, from stories of Adriatic research trips Walt took as a feckless grad student to Steve’s frustration with the endless cyclical arguments that occur at every socialist artists meeting he attends, inevitably overtaken by kids who moved to the big city on their parents’ penny and don’t know what it’s like to scrape together enough to eat. Walt got tenure a couple of years ago, so his next meal is never in peril, but the farm he grew up on out in Ohio had its share of bad seasons. Within the walls of Columbia, smelling of old stone and ivy, Steve often feels out of place. It’s easy to slip into wondering if art, and literature, and poetry are pleasures only those without hunger can partake, or that hunger itself only comes in one form.

Professor Sampson reaches into the crate, his graduate students stepping back in unison, a strangely worshipful gesture, and tugs at the visible newspaper. It gives with a tear, peeling back in his hand, and they all crane their necks in closer to catch a glimpse of what it reveals. 

At first, just a mottled brown, earthy and rough. Then, Sampson finds a larger opening in the paper and parts it, folding it back like opening a large book. Underneath, the earthy brown gives way to green, rich and mossy, and celadon patches the clear high blue-green of shallow water. The form is indistinct at first, a rough topography of aged bronze, but as Sampson tucks the paper away to its sides, something human begins to take form. Near life-size, its heft weighs down the cushioning straw around it.

“Apollo,” Sampson says, with pride in his voice like he’s the one who sculpted it. “We think, at least. This —” he scrapes one hand down the left-hand side, a smooth outward curve with a narrow dip at the top — “resembles the torso of the Apollo Sauroktonos, with its upstretched arm.” He turns to the Apostles and gestures at them to help; Walt and Steve step forward, too, and together the five of them grasp the edges of the torso, open and raw where limbs have been wrenched, eroded, or broken away. In his hands, the bronze is colder than Steve expected, and rough, the inner cast surface revealed as it was never intended to be. 

Little more than a torso fragment, it’s not heavy enough to warrant all five of them lifting. Nonetheless, they move together, breath held and steps small, hands soft with the ancient cargo. A table awaits the piece; later, a mount will be constructed so it can arise and sit on a plinth, but for now they lower it, supine, to recline on the table. It rocks gently once, then stills.

Without head or limbs, the sculpture could seem pathetic, a meager fragment, even macabre. What Steve sees, though, is the gentle curve of a youthful body, the missing raised arm stretching the muscles of one side and leaving a dip at the underarm. The softness of that hollow, the suggestion of smooth, hairless flesh, beckons, as though inviting the trace of fingertips. The body is quite unlike his own, its youthful musculature still that of a young god, and too lithe and smooth to resemble Bucky’s, now. But there’s something of their shared past in it, in the surface brushed smooth by its sculptor and polished further by the abrasions of time, that suggest the golden sun glinting off Steve’s peers at sixteen, seventeen, off Bucky standing wet on a sandy beach and smiling at Steve like he knows every thought written in his eyes, on his wanting mouth. He’d wanted to place his mouth there, at the join of Bucky’s arm to his torso, where he had only a smattering of hair and the skin got soft and delicate, wanted it like a shocking heat poured all over his body.

Walt lifts one hand, as though to touch the Apollo, but leaves it hovering like a benediction. “The way movement is suggested here,” he says, gesturing over the abdomen, his hand sweeping towards the pelvis, broken off so just the top of the pelvic cradle shows, “it’s so subtly molded.” The abdomen twists in a gentle serpentine, lightly defined muscles suggesting a young man on the cusp of adulthood, not yet fleshed out in the way other gods might be depicted. 

“And here,” Sampson says, pointing to the side where Apollo’s waist curves in, “just the smallest crease.” 

“It’s spectacular,” Walt agrees. He lets his fingertips just graze the bronze, at the edge of the shoulder where it opens into the internal chasm. He runs them around the edges of the armhole, as though feeling the roughness of an ancient join now sundered, a wondering and curious touch. As Sampson turns to say something to Matthew and Mark and Steve wonders if he might, too, touch the rough edges of the sculpture like that, like he’s feeling out something purely intellectual, Walt’s hand slips down, the pad of his thumb sliding into the smooth crevice Steve so wanted to touch. He lingers, giving it a delicate stroke, and Steve feels his own breathing stutter.

“You’ll enjoy this,” Walt had said. “A once-in-a-lifetime experience.” Had he known? Had he anticipated? Had he invited Steve here, knowing that they might both gaze upon the fragment and feel it standing in for other bodies they remembered?

“Here,” Walt says, an undertone quiet enough that the archaeologists don’t notice, turning his funny half-smile to Steve, “feel the way it’s polished smooth here,” and moves his hand away, allows Steve to reach and rub his fingertips along the ridge of the pectoral muscle and dip downward. It is smooth, the patina a gleaming, soft blue-green. Steve draws his hand down the side of the torso, allowing his palm to cup ever slightly around the curve of the body. The rigid bronze under his hand is so cold, so insensate compared to the illusion of movement, of a body caught reaching, of warm flesh that yields to pressure. 

“It’s strange to think how long ago it was cast,” Steve murmurs, aware that his statement is deficient, pedestrian in the face of the wonder he means: cast and polished, assembled and delivered, displayed and adored, and then, at some point, toppled, buried, fragmented. He knows the barest details of its provenance: uncovered in the late nineteenth century, not terribly prized due to its fragmentary state, sold to one collector then another and now donated to the study collection. Likely Greek, unlike the Roman copies more commonly made in marble. 

“The eternal beauty of the Greeks,” Matthew-or-Mark says, and then something in German that Steve only half-catches, his German more conversational and Yiddish-inflected than academic. Something about the Greek climate.

“Nothing is eternal,” Walt argues. “Just things that remain, and still touch us.” Matthew-or-Mark makes a small, sour face, but doesn’t argue back. “I think that makes them more precious,” he adds, placing one hand gently on the sculpture’s abdomen, where he’d feel it rise and fall with breath were the bronze alive. 

“It’s made it,” Steve says, which is closer to what he means. Things persist, survive; are forgotten and found again; are reviled and cherished.

+++++

April 1940, Lyon, France

They have barely three days’ notice once their papers come through. Passage to England, then to Canada, where Zipporah’s brother sponsors them. Freida, the baby and the worrier, fusses about what will happen to her beloved cat, Bepo, and if her friends will forget her. She packs her one allotted suitcase with five dolls, her favorite dress, and Bepo shoved in one corner, the cat taking it with the indulgence he’s given Freida since they were both tiny things. Julian has to laugh when he sees it, even though he next has to tell her to pack more practically, with sturdy woolens and an extra pair of boots. The cat they’ll leave with the neighbors. Julian hopes Freida will forgive him that one day.

In his own case he puts his best suit, three changes of underwear, and half of the family photos. Zipporah will carry the rest, and will no doubt try to fit in all the things the girls want to bring but can’t fit in their own cases, and end up without any clothes of her own. He reminds himself to check in the morning; no doubt there would be enough room in the small corners of his case for one of her dresses, should it be necessary. 

In their home, there is much to be missed: the silver passed down from Zipporah’s mother, the dining room table they painstakingly saved for in their first year of marriage, the chair where Zipporah spent many long nights nursing and soothing and reading to their three girls. Besides all of that, and the family pictures Zipporah meticulously labels, with her secretary’s copperplate, there are only two things Julian must save. His family, who all have the necessary paperwork to get out of France, and his art collection, which does not. 

On the morning of the second day, Julian goes into town to change francs into British pounds and to speak to a man who owns a large warehouse, who will, for a sum, allow him to store a few crates for the next year. Or — a few, he decides, paying out another small stack of banknotes. 

Zipporah takes the girls to say goodbye to their friends. There will be tears; he doesn’t envy her that task. In his office, he removes carefully from the walls his paintings. Two landscapes of French farmland, by minor Impressionists, a brilliant portrait of a woman all in blue by a German expressionist, one small, strange abstract composition that he couldn’t take his eyes off of at an auction three autumns ago. Against a muddy blue background, shapes not quite geometric, with softening edges blurred like they’re gently melting, spread and dance. He has eclectic taste, certainly, but it’s still unlike anything else in his possession.

Turning it over, he carefully slices away the backing paper, prises out the metal points, and lifts the canvas away from the frame. He doesn’t have much space, and they’ll store better this way. When he turns it over, he expects it to look diminished without the pomp and authority lent by the frame. It doesn’t. Held between his hands, intimate and close, it strikes him anew, somewhere in the gut. The unexpected balance of its forms, so precariously arranged, catches his breath. What may seem an unplanned jumble of shapes and lines shifts into a delicate tension. One choice, one decision could send it all toppling or set it sturdy. 

His hands tremble. There’s a quantity of straw in the crate that he arranges around canvas as he tucks it in, upright. He picks up his knife and turns over the next painting.

+++++

June 1940, Brooklyn, New York

“I’ve always wanted to go to Paris,” Becca says, waver in her voice.

“It’ll still _be_ there,” Mrs. Barnes says, firmly. For a moment, there’s silence. All his life — or, well, the past decade-and-change of his life that he’s known Bucky, which eclipses most of the rest of his life that came before it — Mrs. Barnes has been able to pronounce, just like that, and somehow will things into being. Small things: Steve’s presence at dinner, or Bucky’s hands clean, or everyone quiet because for goodness’ sake, Mass is about to start. But other things as well, like the first settled, sure sense Steve felt that life would be okay after Ma died, when a few months after the funeral Mrs. Barnes had him over to bake bread — so they could feed themselves in that apartment of theirs, she’d claimed — and said, in the same voice, “You’ll feel like you can breathe again, at some point.” His bread had turned out lumpy, and she had sent him home with a loaf of hers, which quickly became a tradition. 

“Course it will,” Bucky says. “You’ll see it someday.” When it’s not infested with Nazis, he doesn’t add, but they all hear it. When every day’s headlines don’t bring new dread, Steve thinks. _Nazis Inside Paris Gates_ , the Times declared that morning. And below, in smaller letters, _Urgent Pleas to US_. It can’t be long now — that’s what he’d said to Bucky when they’d read the paper together. The US will _have_ to help.

“You wouldn’t want to go now anyway,” Steve says. “They’d taken all the good stuff out of the Louvre and stashed it. There’d be nothing to see.” Becca gives him a cracked smile, perhaps reassured for now. They all of them put on a brave face at the dinner table, as though by silent pact. It’s a place where they leave fear behind. These days, that’s more than enough to ensure the continuation of weekly Sunday suppers at the Barnes house, even if Steve and Bucky don’t get themselves to church first more often than not. Bucky welcomes the opportunity to sleep in and Steve the avoidance of more guilt than he already carries. There’s so much more he could be doing, and he doesn’t need someone to tell him that the best thing to bring him peace in this world is a sin. 

“How is your work going, Steve?” Mr. Barnes asks, changing the subject rather pointedly. The whole room seems to let out a breath, held since they sat down, the air full of unspoken worries. 

“Well,” Steve says. “Really well, actually.” He’d finished the indexing of Walt’s book a few months ago and helped with a final copy edit before it was sent off to the printers. 

“Walt’s hired him on as a research assistant for the summer,” Bucky says, beaming at him across the table. A little flush creeps up Steve’s cheeks, the warmth of Bucky’s pride nestling in his body. Bucky _is_ proud of him, he knows, and yet it surprises him anew every time. 

“Really? That sounds interesting,” Mrs. Barnes says, passing the bread basket to Becca with the uncanny timeliness of a mother who notices the moment someone has taken the last bite on their plate. Becca takes two rolls happily, peeling them open to spread them with butter. 

“It’s a lot of time in the library,” Steve says, “but I enjoy it.” It’s true; he finds he’s grown a fondness for the old Italian things he’s sent off to research. Walt’s interests have moved inland for this next book, away from Byzantine Venice and into twelfth-century Florence. Lately his eyes have been filled up with the glittering gold mosaic ceiling of the old baptistery, Christ in the Last Judgment, whose eyes once looked down on the baptism of Dante himself. They’ll move on to lesser known and less auspicious chapels later, but for now Steve doesn’t at all mind gathering up all he can find on this building that stood steady as Alberti and Brunelleschi studied its lines, as Donatello and Michelangelo bustled about and worked and carved. 

“Bertha Jacobs’s son — you know Mrs. Jacobs, who lives in the blue house, the next block over —” Mrs. Barnes gestures in the relevant direction and continues without a beat — “her son is an artist, too. Got hired on to do one of those government projects, you know, post offices, libraries. She says it’s good money.”

Steve just catches Bucky rolling his eyes, masked by the enormous bite Bucky leans in to take. Mrs. Barnes means well. “They are, if you can get them,” Steve agrees. A couple of folks at the League have gotten hired on, posters mostly, some working as assistants on murals. The photography assignments, the lead painters — those all go to established artists, folks who already have a name. “I’m keeping my ears open,” he assures. She looks mollified, for the time being. 

“And yourself, James?” she says, catching Bucky in the middle of bite. They both tend to stuff themselves on Sundays, as though to savor the flavor they’re not really capable of achieving themselves, and Bucky’s on his third helping of stew. 

Swallowing, Bucky says, “Real good, Ma. I’ve been doing more repair calls lately, so it’s less time on the factory floor.” He tears off part of a roll and eats it between sentences. “We’re rolling out a new machine for small presses, so lots of testing. You know,” he shrugs; he’s been at Mergenthaler’s linotype machine factory since his first job as a parts runner in high school, so most of what goes on in his day-to-day is familiar to them all. Satisfied, Mrs. Barnes turns to asking Becca how a school project is getting on.

++

It’s still light out on their walk home, the light golden and the air not yet full of the choking humidity that would come later in summer. In one hand, Bucky swings a bag holding three loaves of bread, fresh that morning. Despite his lighthearted gait, his expression is somber; Steve suspects they’re both preoccupied with the news in Europe, so successfully avoided for the remainder of dinner. A thought gnaws at the edges of Steve’s mind, as it has since that morning — since the war was declared, really, only intensified by the news of the German army advancing into France. He hasn’t said anything, hasn’t really let himself think too much on it at all, but there it is, looming and making itself known. 

“I’ve been thinking,” he says, and wants to swallow his tongue right away. Bucky looks over at him, blinking a little like Steve’s jerked him out of his own thoughts. 

When Steve doesn’t continue, Bucky says, “’Bout what, sweetheart?” kindly, the way he talks to Steve in bed in the morning, before they’re either of them fully awake.

“About — if we get into the war.” Bucky nods, but Steve can see something in his eyes: apprehension. “I think I’ll sign up,” Steve says, finally getting the words out. Bucky looks away, not unkindly, but it still stings.

“You think so?” he asks, carefully, to his shoes. 

Steve hadn’t — well, he hadn’t known what to expect from Bucky, truly; they’d not broached the subject before. Steve had been holding it close. He didn’t figure Bucky would laugh at him, but this, this careful tip-toe is nearly as bad. “Yeah,” he says, a touch forcefully. “Don’t see how I could just hang out here while other men went and fought. While folks over there _have_ been fighting.” 

Bucky nods, as though he’d expected that answer. “Well, we’re not in the war yet,” he says, glancing at Steve and then away. He says it like it’s a relief. Steve has to swallow down the bitter disappointment that wells in his throat.

“Not yet,” he says instead. They walk on.

+++++

October 1940, Brooklyn, New York

The world favors them; when Steve’s just wrapping up the last of his summer research work with Walt, Bucky gets word that he’s been accepted for a promotion that will take him off the manufacturing floor and into sales. He’s a natural, of course, with that winning grin and squared-off tie, and he knows just about as much as one man can know about the linotype machines manufactured by Mergenthaler. He’s come by more than once to fix the Mergenthaler at the League, where students use it to set type for posters and pamphlets and the occasional inflammatory satirical magazine. On the floor since he was sixteen, Bucky knows the workings of every machine they make. 

It’s a third again what he made working on the factory floor; were this any other time, Steve would have something to say about that, because accounts managers would have fuck-all to do if it weren’t for the men breaking their bodies on the floor, would they, and who gets the greenbacks in the end? As it is, though, he can only sit, beaming, as Bucky tells him about his responsibilities and how his hours won’t start before fucking dawn. 

“And you won’t come home reeking of oil,” Steve says, with an exaggerated sniff. Bucky’s still in his work clothes, too eager to share the news to change.

“Enjoy it while you can,” Bucky says, tossing one arm over Steve’s shoulder and pulling him close. Steve shoves him away, laughing, but finds himself settling back against Bucky’s side after Bucky lets him go. He probably will miss it; he’s not too proud to admit that he favors the sweat-heavy smell of Bucky before he cleans up, ripe and warm. Bucky kisses his temple indulgently as Steve noses at his underarm, laughing a bit despite himself. He kisses at him, through his shirt: the soft underside of his arms, the rise of his ribcage where he’s ticklish when his skin is bare, the curve of his chest. Bucky settles into him, humming a soft, pleased little noise. 

“Hey, we should celebrate,” Steve says, pulling away enough to look at Bucky.

“I thought that’s what we were working on,” Bucky says, lifting one eyebrow and letting his gaze sweep up and down Steve’s body. 

Steve laughs, sits up straighter. “We can get to that, too,” he says. “But, I thought — what about dancing? You haven’t been out dancing in ages.” He used to go out every weekend, when they were teenagers, to wholesome dance halls with wholesome girls who would nonetheless let Bucky kiss them out back. He used to tell Steve all about it, until Steve was the one he was kissing, and then the wholesome girls stopped. The dancing didn’t, but it’s slowed down over the years. 

“Hell, why not,” Bucky says. “But only if you’ll dance with me.”

Steve rolls his eyes. The rare time he’d gone out with Bucky and found a willing single gal to dance with him, it’d been like he had not just two, but half-a-dozen left feet. He’s more at ease with Bucky, though, and better in the kind of place where no one will look twice at them — at least not them together; everyone seems to look at Bucky. “I’ll call up some folks,” Steve says. 

“Oh, now, don’t make a big thing —”

“Your friends will be happy to celebrate you,” Steve says, standing up. “Go clean yourself up, you filthy beast.”

At the telephone down in the common hallway, he calls Babe and Lenny’s house first. Their Ma answers and bellows for Babe when Steve asks for either of them, then tells Steve to come by for dinner sometime. “Nice boy like you, good head on your shoulders, you would be good for my Deborah.” It’s not the first time she’s suggested it, but it still sends Steve spluttering for a response.

He’s saved by Babe’s weary voice in the background. “Ma, stop pestering him.”

“I’m not, I’m only —” Steve hears before there’s a rustle against the receiver.

Babe says, muffled like her hand is still partway covering up the receiver, “Steve is otherwise engaged, Ma. He’s just too polite to say. Hiya, Steve,” she adds, into the phone.

“How’d you know it was me?”

“You’re the only one of my friends she pesters like that.”

“Does that mean I’m the only nice boy you know?” Steve asks, grinning into the telephone. Babe snorts.

“I’ll bring you home next time you get us into a fight, see how nice she thinks you are then.”

“What d’ya say to a nice boy asking you out to dance?”

“Depends on where you propose to take me, pretty boy,” Babe says, dropping her voice into a caricature of the smoky husk she uses to talk to pretty dames at the bar. 

“Brown’s, we figured,” Steve says. It’s the only one of the queer bars this side of the river that caters to fellas and gals at once. “We’re celebrating,” he adds. “Bucky got a promotion.”

“Damn, can’t turn that down. We’ll be there at nine.”

++

Brown’s is already crowded when they arrive. It’s been long enough for Steve that he doesn’t recognize the fella on the door, but Babe and Lenny greet him like an old friend and they’re all let in without the usual once-over. It’s not that Brown’s has standards, really, but raids are frequent enough that they’re cautious. Inside, they split off, Babe and Len to find a table, Steve and Bucky to the bar. A few more friends will join them, and they’ll no doubt see more folks they know over the course of the night.

Leaning on the bar with one elbow, Bucky tips his chin at the bartender, who pours a beer at the far end. The bartender notices, giving Bucky a once-over and a slight smile as he nods in acknowledgment. Some days, those glances still send a knot of jealousy to Steve’s guts, a pallid reminder of the heady first few months after they took up together, when Steve felt like he was always waiting for Bucky to change his mind, to send Steve back to best friend status when he found someone prettier, someone less ill, to kiss. 

Then he’d fallen ill with scarlet fever, one of the few things he’d managed to avoid as a child. He’d slept a lot, rash spreading across his chest and limbs, fever keeping his body limp and mind muddled. He remembers cool compresses and his Ma’s face, appearing alongside her soft and soothing voice over those few days, and most of all he remembers Bucky, at his bedside clutching his hand, or curled up sleeping in a chair. Bucky, with his hair gone limp without washing and his face sallow without sleep and his eyes worried. Bucky, there when he woke up feeling clearer, looking like Steve was everything good at once. 

The light in the bar is low, with a yellow cast, and it gleams on the Brylcreemed sweep of Bucky’s hair. Bucky’s shoulders are loose, his smile easy as he turns and grins at Steve. There are few places outside of their apartment where Steve gets to feel the full glow of that grin, not just fond but filthy. It’s grown as familiar as Bucky’s footfall in their apartment, as the way they have to jiggle the doorknob to open the front door, as his own hand curled loosely around a pencil. Steve leans up on his toes and smacks a kiss to the bottom of Bucky’s mouth, feeling the rush of danger that comes from doing that anywhere that isn’t home. As he pulls away, the bartender appears, looking peevish. 

“Four beers,” Bucky says, barely glancing at the bartender, and licks his lower lip, where Steve’s mouth had just been. 

By the time they get to their table, it’s nearly full; Steve had telephoned a handful of Bucky’s friends, and nearly all of them had rounded up another person or two, or bumped into someone once inside Brown’s. Steve doesn’t know everyone in the little cluster, but Bucky moves through them giving jovial hugs and broad, loose grins. Steve catches some names, mostly of folks to his right since his left ear doesn’t pick up as much, and doesn’t worry overmuch about those he doesn’t get. Bucky’s got far more friends than he does, anyway, with his easy manner and his tendency to not drive them away with over-serious political conversation, a habit Steve knows he himself is all too prone to.

He sees some sailors’ whites scattered throughout the crowd around them. It’s not unusual, Brown’s being near enough to the docks to allow them the deniability of just having stumbled in, should a raid happen. It seems like more sailors than usual; that or Steve simply notices them more these days. He sees men in Army uniforms around town, too, as though his eye is drawn to their broad-shouldered silhouettes. More than one fella in their neighborhood has signed up, anticipating the U.S. entering the war any day, but Steve holds off. 

They won’t take him now. He knows that. But at some point, they’ll be in this war, and the Army won’t be able to say no to a willing man. Or the Navy, or whomever will take him. 

Distracted, he misses one of Bucky’s friends saying something to his left. Babe elbows him, jerking his attention back to the gathering. He thinks he notices Bucky looking at him, but when he glances up, Bucky’s in animated conversation with Jimmy, a guy he boxes with sometimes. With effort, Steve brings his attention to Bucky’s friend next to him, tilting his head a little to catch his question.

++

The beer leaves Steve feeling warm, senses muffled like the world around him is a little too thick. “’S like walking through custard,” he says to Bucky, whose arm is hooked around his. 

“Just as sweet,” Bucky says. Steve thinks hard, but can’t figure out if that response makes sense at all. He pushes a little at Bucky, anyway. They’re outside the bar, heading home, and should watch themselves.

“Aw, stop it, Stevie,” Bucky says, slinging his arm over Steve’s shoulders, tucking him close. Pulling him in, Bucky smacks a kiss on the side of Steve’s temple.

“I’m too drunk to fight,” Steve says. “You’ll have to beat them up.”

“Who?” Bucky says. They make their way, mostly in a straight line so far as Steve can tell, down the sidewalk.

“Them,” Steve says, gesturing in front of them. There isn’t always a _them_ , but often enough. Fellas pouring out of much different bars, ready to take their fists to the fairies coming down from docks at the end of the night. 

“We’ll take ‘em,” Bucky says, reassuring. It’s warm under his arm, snug against the side of his chest. 

“I don’t want this to stop,” Steve says, rubbing his cheek against the scratch of Bucky’s jacket. Is that what uniforms feel like, he wonders. He’ll miss this when he leaves.

“Well, we have to get home sometime,” Bucky says, laughing. “But we can go dancing again.” Steve had danced once, with Bucky, and watched the rest of the time. He’ll miss that, too, watching Bucky in a crowd. 

“Home,” Steve agrees. Home, for now, will work.

+++++

February 1941, Jackson Heights Station Post Office, Flushing, New York

“What if I just painted one dick? Somewhere unobtrusive —” Benjamin gestures with his paintbrush, sketching a not-terribly-unobtrusive phallic form in the air. 

“Just give some of the workers generous bulges,” Marcus says, nonplussed. “It fits with their general physique, anyway.” 

Benjamin sighs dramatically. “It’s not the same.” 

Steve picks up the mural cartoon, scrutinizing it with mock attention. It’s not terribly inspired — the by-now-familiar array of muscular blue-collar workers, foreshortened views of golden fields and orderly neighborhoods, an orator in the center with one hand raised, his face benignly beardless. Too many beards and folks start to suspect Darwin or, much worse, Marx. Steve can’t remember who the orator is supposed to be: some Queens politician, he thinks. “Do you think they paint out extra dicks, or do they save that for inflammatory Whitman poetry?” 

“Now, was it for the socialism or the homosexuality that they painted the Whitman out? I’m not sure that dick paintings count under either,” Marcus says, as though giving it serious consideration. 

“Neither, it was the iconoclasm,” Steve answers. He’d followed the uproar closely, had even headed down to the Bronx General Post Office to see the murals as they went up. His oil painting professor was an old friend of the artist, who had himself worked with Diego Rivera on the ill-fated Rockefeller mural, destroyed when Rivera delivered a visual lesson on the merits of communism to America’s biggest capitalist tycoon. Irony that Shahn’s own mural had come under threat, some said; Steve figures it’s more likely that their shared beliefs in the corruption of the world’s capitalist institutions ruffles too many feathers. That’s what Ben Shahn had had to paint out: a declaration from Whitman to recast, maybe to discard, art and churches and poetry. To discard is not quite iconoclasm, is not quite destruction, but to an American public in need of uplifting it skirted too close.

“No dicks, no Marx, no Whitman; I don’t even know why we’re here,” Benjamin says. Steve’s there because the Section is a good damned paycheck, which Benjamin doesn’t really need, only in art classes part time while he trains to take over his father’s shipping business. There’s another, unspoken reason why they’re all there, transferring another artist’s cartoon to the broad walls of the post office, filling in the underpainting that provides structure to his final vision, creating a work that will not bear their own names. It will persist, though, their handiwork — long after they’re gone. 

Standing, Steve tapes the cartoon to the section of wall they’ve just gridded off. Their first step will be to transfer the smaller image onto the wall, working with pencil to sketch each small section that will make the whole. The wall looms above them, vast. They’ll use scaffolding to reach the top, technology that has changed little since an elderly Michelangelo created his Last Judgment on the wall of the Sistine. The paint hasn’t changed much, either; they won’t grind their own pigments, but will mix the store-bought color with egg yolk and water, creating a tempera that will last as long as those delicate Byzantine icons Walt studies. The figures they paint won’t be saints or icons, but farmers, miners, seamstresses, and factory workers. Not to worship, for this isn’t a church, but to live with. Figures to look down on average folks doing average things: sending parcels and receiving letters, writing out telegrams and wiring money, getting gossip and news and sometimes the memory of a loved one’s touch, sent in the fragile pages of an airmail letter.

+++++

June 1941, Island of Jersey, Channel Islands

“A whole group of them, in the cafe,” Marcel crows proudly, tossing their cardigan onto a chair. “Half of them took newspapers, with our tract in them.” Claude smiles up at them, pleased. The soldiers are out of the house, the little rooms by the kitchen where Claude and Marcel now live blessedly quiet without their boots stomping above. Claude types the most during these times, taking advantage of the Germans’ absence to clack out as many copies of their little brochures, tracts, and fliers as possible. The typewriter they hide beneath the bed anytime they are out. It wasn’t illegal to own — at least not yet — but it wouldn’t do to have suspicions fall upon them.

For who among the Nazis would suspect them? They’re old now, both of them, dismissed by most of the islanders and invaders alike as doddering old women, and thusly ignored. Some few in town know them as artists, but — though it would pain many of their friends from Paris to admit it — the stylings of Dada had made little impression on the people of Jersey, and thus that designation means little. In jodhpurs and old Wellingtons, with the stoop expected of people their age, they pass through the town without notice, dropping their little works here and there.

Marcel sits next to Claude at the little desk, and pulls nearer a stack of writing paper and their favorite pen. Rolling the final paper out of the typewriter, Claude stacks it with its compatriots — slivers of paper with lurid descriptions of the bombing damage done to Schleswig-Holstein. Last week, they’d heard a second lieutenant worry over the damage done to his farm, and learned that perhaps a third of his regiment issued from Schleswig-Holstein. Wouldn’t it be a shame, Marcel had thought, if they were to be too worried over their families to concentrate? 

“I think we should write about Russia next,” Claude says, picking up one of the tracts, printed on thin colored paper, and beginning to roll it up. They’re perfectly sizes to slip into cigarette boxes. “Herr Kommandant is terrified of being sent there,” they add. He isn’t a Kommandant, the officer who has taken over their home and filled it with his men, merely a lieutenant, but his pompous bearing has earned him the nickname, said always with disdain. 

“As well he should be,” Marcel says. With the winds whipping up off the Channel, Jersey in winter is bitterly cold, air like stinging daggers. And yet to winter here is mere play compared to Hitler’s planned invasion of Russia’s southern front. Picking up the pen, Marcel thinks for a moment before scratching off a few lines. While they occasionally have time to tune into the British radio broadcasts, only when the house is very empty and no one likely to wander down the lane, Marcel is wonderful at thinking up their own little missives, even without the help of Allied propaganda. 

Leaning in, Claude reads over Marcel’s shoulder, hands still working at rolling up the thin paper strips. _Imminent reports of march into Russia…prepare for a long winter…Hitler leads a war without end and men fall without end._ At the bottom, signed, always, _The Soldier Without a Name._ Marcel holds the paper up for Claude’s approval, and at their nod begins to rewrite the missive in German. Only Marcel writes German, so Claude will meticulously copy their handwriting at the typewriter. 

They decided together, early on, that their project must seem to come from within Nazi ranks. Doubt is the key: every soldier has the capacity to change his mind, to hesitate, to defect. Their work they disseminate any way they can devise, tucking small notes into cigarette boxes and larger tracts in between the pages of the local German-translated newspaper. Others they affix to carts and the rare motorcar, hoping to spread beyond the confines of town. When feeling brave — or, perhaps, especially invisible — Claude will brush past soldiers and deposit folded missives into their pockets to be found later. Post boxes, lampposts, bicycles, and barbed wire all serve as messengers. 

Paper is familiar, whether in carboned stacks in their typewriter or cut into small and surreal pieces for the collages they make together. Not lately, it is true; their photographs and montages, manuscripts and letters, everything that represents the long collaborative life they have lived, are tucked into trunks in the locked attic. Now, they turn once again to words, a return that would please their Dada comrades. Claude cannot resist a few images, though. Hitler as a drowning sea captain; a ghoulish skull with haunting, empty eye sockets; a never-ending path filled with crosses of the fallen. Their work had not been gruesome before. Uncanny, perhaps, otherworldly; they’ll admit to pleasure in the ghostly eccentricity of their own bare-headed profile, with its pale skull, lashless eyes, and hooked nose. But the bare little sketches they add to their tracts are full up of dread, stark and amateurish lines, as they hope to convey the horror experienced by those who lose faith. For the Soldier Without a Name is just that — the formerly faithful, the insider, the man with doubts. Their sabotage won’t work if they are known to be saboteurs; rather, they aim to convert the minds of those who already feel the nagging of doubt, those worried about home and about frozen limbs and about a war that never ends. It is to every man’s own sense of his own self-preservation that they take aim, for it becomes clearer every day that decency and empathy might easily be ignored.

Claude and Marcel had been in town the day the first Todt arrived. Gaunt and haunted, wearing ragged clothes and bearing roughly shaved heads, the men — prisoners of war, they later learned, mostly from Poland — shuffled from the boat to the roughly-constructed camps with the kind of obedience only achieved and maintained through violence. They work long days re-building sea wall fortifications, the construction of which most consider a German show of military bravado against a British government that ceded the island without a fight. The sea walls are marked with the blood of those few able-bodied who fought, and now with the exhausted sweat of slaves worked past their ability. No, appeals to decency did nothing to prevent this war, and will do little to stop it.

Marcel finishes the German translation of their text and passes it to Claude. As Claude winds a new sheet of paper into the typewriter, Marcel pulls out the radio — the secret one, the one they have not dutifully reported to the Nazis — and tunes it to the BBC. It comes in, faintly but audibly, and they listen and type.

+++++

December 1941, Columbia University Department of Art History, New York

When Steve shows up on Wednesday, he thinks at first that Walt’s office has been ransacked. Buried under haphazard piles of paper, the desk sits slightly askew from the wall, wheeled chair wobbling slightly as though someone’s just shoved past it. Stacks of books are on every available surface and much of the floor, and none of them, so far as Steve can tell, relate to Walt’s subject. Just as he’s craning his neck to read the spines of a pile that seem to be centered around German medieval sculpture, Walt pops up from behind the shoved-out desk, sheaf of papers triumphantly grasped in one hand. He blinks at Steve as though he can’t quite place why he’s there.

Steve himself isn’t really sure. His whole body seems electric, like something inside him keeps spinning and spinning. The Japanese attacked, and U.S. is in the war now. The research he’d been working on for Walt seems so distant, so dimly unimportant, but Walt hadn’t canceled their meeting. Steve holds up the envelope with his latest notes. “Ready for you,” he says, and starts to tell Walt that he’s going to have to quit. 

“Not important now,” Walt interrupts, dropping the envelope unceremoniously onto one of the piles on his desk.. “Do you know German?” he asks, then steamrolls over Steve’s bewildered, “What,” with “French? Italian?”

“Uh,” Steve says. “A little Italian, to speak. Some Yiddish, a little Irish.” He frowns, thinks back over the shouts he’d hear across the courtyard when he was growing up. Maybe a smattering of German, but not enough to do anything with.

Walt rummages in a pile of books to his left, yanks out a paperback copy of _German for Reading Knowledge_ and shoves it at Steve. “I’ve got a French one around here somewhere, too,” he says. 

“What about the Florentines?”

“They’ve been dead for centuries; they’ll wait,” Walt says, without a hint of humor. He’s bent over, digging through another stack. The top few books are on Gothic cathedrals, and below that, something on Dutch carved altarpieces.

“Walt,” Steve says, and then again when he doesn’t stop, “Walt! What’s going on?”

“Didn’t you hear?” Walt says, voice muffled. “The U.S. declared war.” 

Steve had heard about the attacks during class. Someone, another student maybe, banged into the room to say it, breathless — _Japan has attacked Hawaii_ — before running to the next classroom. He remembers, mostly, the stunned silence breaking when someone dropped a paintbrush. After a long pause, the instructor had turned on a radio.

At that point, the news report was only the barest details, repeated on a loop. It seemed to start to sink in once they’d heard it four of five times. They all left early.

In the streets, you could tell who had heard and who hadn’t, some folks still walking with the casual purpose of a winter Sunday afternoon. Others, though, walked like they were out of breath, mouths open and shocked, fearful white rings to their eyes. Bucky already had the news on the radio when Steve got home and they stayed near it for the rest of the day.

“I know,” Steve says. “I wanted to talk to you about that —” Steve’s already been to one recruitment center, bright and early Monday morning, waiting hours on line only to be told that his asthma alone is enough to brand him 4F.

“Good. We have work to do,” Walt says, standing up with his hands on his hips. His face is red, hair a wild mess. “I’ve been talking with a colleague of mine, George Stout, who has a friend at the State Department. He has an idea, for a section working to preserve art and monuments.”

“In the military?” Steve asks. It doesn’t seem likely. 

Walt shrugs, clearly with the same skepticism. “Artworks are already going missing — stolen — getting blown up and shot at and any gruesome thing you can think of.” Though many museums moved their works, leaving vast galleries empty, that didn’t stop the Luftwaffe from destroying Coventry Cathedral, or half the Wren churches in London. It didn’t stop Hitler from claiming anything left behind in Vienna, in Paris. He’d made well known his plans for a vast museum complex in Linz, and he needed things to fill it up. 

Still, though, that news came along with other reports, ones that include casualty lists. “So are people,” Steve says.

Walt nods. “Yeah. But they need soldiers to fight that. Doctors, nurses — folks who have the right training.” From the desk, he lifts the envelope of research Steve’s just brought in. “We have the right training for something else. Something that needs to be done, if keeping any part of this world after the war is important.” 

“I don’t know —” Steve starts. There are other recruitment centers he can try, maybe see if a different doctor will take a chance on him. 

“We have to start now, so we’ll be ready,” Walt says. “We’ll need lists: of monuments, key works of art, plans of historical buildings. Stout is working on guidelines for protection and preservation that can be disseminated to soldiers in the field. But that’s useless unless they know what they’re trying to protect.”

Steve already has half of that assembled for Florence and the surrounding countryside through the research he’s been working on. It wouldn’t be difficult to shift his focus, to look at things more broadly. And, he thinks, the Army’s not taking him today. “Where do we start?”

+++++

June 1942, Brooklyn, New York

When he sees the scrap of paper in Bucky’s hand, Steve thinks he should have tried to hide it. Thrown it away, got rid of it. Under Bucky’s thumb, the ink of the 4F smears across the paper. 

“I thought you weren’t gonna try again.” Steve shuffles in the door, turning to hang his coat up, back to Bucky’s cold gaze. 

“Yeah, well,” he says, “Thought I’d give it one more go.” Steve reaches out to take the form from Bucky’s hand, but Bucky lifts it up, making a show of peering at the text. 

“You know it’s illegal to lie on your intake form,” Bucky says. “Paramus. Real fucking nice,” he adds. Steve wants to snatch the form from him, but holds back.

“I’ll admit that one hurt,” he says, cracking a smile and turning his face up to look at Bucky’s, finally. Bucky’s stormy glare doesn’t break. 

Handing the form to him, Bucky turns away, walks to the sink. A couple of glasses sit on the counter, dry from the morning’s wash, and he picks them up and puts them away. Drawn tight, his shoulders move stiffly, and Steve can just see the way he works his jaw like he’s trying not to say something. 

“There are men laying down their lives,” Steve says, simply. They’ve had this discussion — this argument — before. Bucky sees him in so many ways, sees all of him, but he can’t seem to let his eyes rest on this part of Steve. This part that clutches him hard, urgently, in the chest and shakes him aware. “I don’t deserve to do anything less.”

The last time they’d argued, when Steve had come home as Steve from Long Island, 4F, Bucky had said that there were things to do here, work needing done that Steve could provide. Walt gives him a stipend — out of his own salary, Steve’s pretty sure — but it’s not really enough to live on. Factories don’t want him — hell, Becca’s already started at the cannery with the first rush of girls, but she’s strong and strapping and doesn’t buckle over with asthma after standing too long — so that means it’s victory gardens and scrap metal. Poster work, he supposes, as the country shifts from needing uplifting murals in post offices to bond buying entreaties. Or he could keep on making lists, lists and lists that the government doesn’t seem to want. It’s not enough — it would never be enough — and Steve knows that Bucky knows that, so it stings. 

This time, Bucky doesn’t suggest scrap metal or any such thing. He places their two stacked breakfast plates on the shelf with a gentle clink and says, without turning around, “Do you think I’m a coward, Steve?”

“What? Bucky, no —” Steve takes a halting, urgent step forward. Bucky grips the edge of the counter, shoulders impenetrable. 

“I’m not in uniform. Do you think I’m a coward?” He turns around, finally, mouth grim and gaze unflinching. Steve catches his eye, holds it.

“You’re the bravest man I know,” he says, thinking of Bucky’s arm around his shoulders, right out in the clear light of day; of their mouths wet together at fifteen; of the tenderness of his heart. All the bravery the neighborhood boys, or the priests, or his own Pa tried to beat, to sanctify, to work right out of him. 

Bucky shakes his head. He’s leant against the countertop, as if this a casual conversation, but his hands grip the edge so hard that Steve can see it all through his body, the tension. “You must think I’m a coward,” he says, “because I haven’t given them my name.”

“Well, you —”

“I won’t,” Bucky interrupts. Pushing himself away from the counter, he stands in the middle of the kitchen, feet apart like he’s readying for a fight. Feet apart like he taught Steve — _give yourself some room, yeah, bend your knees, fists up_. “I won’t be signing up. I won’t _ask_ them to take me, to —”

Bucky breaks off, looks away. Swallows, hard. Steve knew Bucky hadn’t signed up yet, figured he was just waiting for the right time. For the busy season at work to end, for Becca’s nineteenth birthday, for the big Barnes family Easter supper to pass. 

“I won’t ask them,” Bucky repeats, “to take me away from here.” He points at the floor, hand trembling. “Away from you. I won’t. And you — you’re standing here like that’s the only thing you want.” 

Sourness rises in Steve’s mouth. “That’s not —” he starts. Bucky waits, looking at Steve like he’s — like he’s disappointed. “I’m not — I’m not trying to leave you.”

“Oh, yeah? It just doesn’t matter if you do, so long as you get what you want, is that it?” 

“That’s not fair,” Steve says. It’s not about what he _wants_ ; Bucky should know that. Because Steve’s made lists — he’s made _so many fucking lists_ that some days his eyes can only see a litany of sculptures, paintings, historical buildings and troves of archives — and the government doesn’t care. Walt takes his typed-in-triplicate lists and sends a copy to his man up in Boston, who sends them on to the guy he knows at the State Department, who, for all they know, tosses them in the trash. The Army certainly isn’t calling them up, asking if they’d like to come over and tell them which statues they _can’t_ blow up in their attempts to keep Hitler from taking over half of the damned planet. 

Bucky’s hand curls into a fist, thumps against the counter top, not quite a punch. “What’s not fair is you acting like this is the only option.”

“It is —” Steve starts, because it’s the only thing that feels fully right: being there, over there, and doing _something._ He doesn’t want to kill anyone, he just — Steve looks at his hands. The best part of him, the most effective. He just wants to fucking _do_ something.

“It’s not,” Bucky says. “Because you’ll fucking die over there, Steve.” His voice ends ragged on Steve’s name, like he’s ripping the thought out of him, painfully. 

“You don’t know —”

“I’m not being protective,” Bucky interrupts. “You’ll get shot and bleed out, or if you don’t, you’ll have an asthma attack from the smoke and dust and gas, or if you don’t, you’ll get the ‘flu in the winter and you won’t have a bed, or hot tea, or me, and _you’ll die._ ” His voice breaks, tears tracking down his cheeks. Steve’s seen Bucky cry a handful of times; they don’t hide their fear or pain or sorrow from one another. Or, he thought they didn’t, but Bucky’s here standing in front of him spilling out fears that must be eating away at him, cancerous thoughts growing and spreading with every 4F Steve brings home. 

Steve knows the risks. He hasn’t been sick much this year, but he lives with his tight lungs, his deaf ear, his aching legs every day. He knows Basic won’t transform him; he knows there are more dangers to the battlefield than bullets alone. He knows, but — “I can’t be afraid of that,” Steve says, softly, stepping closer to Bucky so he can put one hand over Bucky’s curled fist on the counter top. Bucky blinks furiously, eyes wet and mouth snarled in frustration, but doesn’t pull his hand away. 

“I fucking am,” he says. “I’m fucking terrified.” He shrugs up one shoulder, almost violently. “It’s the only thing I’ve ever been scared of, losing you.” 

“Oh,” Steve says, an inadequate, scared little sound. Logically, he knows that Bucky worries over his health; he’s woken to Bucky sitting next to his bed after an illness more times than he remembers, going back years. But this — the vehemence of Bucky’s fear startles him, if only because he himself has long since stopped fearing his own death, really. Sure, he worries about getting an illness he can’t shake or an asthma attack he can’t settle, but the bone-weary ache of his own short life doesn’t haunt him. It just exists, there with him, the knowledge that his life will be shorter than others’, demanding that he do something with it. 

Stepping forward, Steve wraps his arm around Bucky’s waist, leaning his head on Bucky’s chest. Against him, Bucky is rigid, breathing harsh and shallow. “I can’t ask you to forgive me this,” Steve says, barely more than a whisper. “But I don’t know another way.” He does, his mind screams at him: accept that no branch of the military will have him, stay in Brooklyn and watch Bucky no doubt get drafted, make lists and lists and live as the one who fears getting a telegram at his door. Or, a visit from Becca or Mrs. Barnes, he corrects himself, for he is not Bucky’s next of kin. They’re nothing to each other, in the eyes of the government: everything they are together is right here, between them. Steve clings harder, and Bucky starts to soften, his breathing slow. 

“I know,” Bucky says. “Goddamn, do I know — there’s only ever one way with you.” It’s not said as harsh as it could be, and Bucky finally lifts his arms to wrap around Steve’s shoulders. “I’m never going to be okay with this, I’m never —” he stops, breath shuddering. “The minute those bastards take you, I’m signing up too,” he says, finally, cracking something open in Steve, something harsh and a little sour. 

“Okay,” Steve says. “Okay.”

+++++

February 1943, Brooklyn, New York

Bucky’s draft letter comes in October. By then, Steve had long since tried every enlistment office in the five boroughs and had a stack of 4F cards and nothing else to show for it. He’s still making lists with Walt, having just pushed past the Alps and into France. WPA jobs have increased, too, so he makes enough to live on doing poster work. 

The letter calls Bucky to Fort Benning, Columbus, Georgia, by the beginning of November, giving them just days to arrange his uniform and his train passage. Steve kisses him firmly at home, seeing him off at the door, because a goodbye at the train station seems unbearable. Then, for the next three months, Steve tries to forget to pour two cups of coffee in the morning. 

It doesn’t work well. He’s never lived alone, and the air in the apartment feels too flat, too stale, without someone else there stirring it up. Steve keeps to his side of the bed but doubles over the blankets, too cold in the whistling November chill without Bucky pressed against him. He spends as much time away as he can, in class or the library, at meetings and rallies. It’s always too quiet and dark when he gets home. 

Today, Steve sits at the table with his latest commission in front of him. A supplication to buy war bonds, faced by a broad-chested soldier thrusting out a pole with an American flag. His shirt is tattered, twisting in rags around one arm, but his gaze points upward, looking up from under his helmet. His hair is dark, his cheekbones familiar, his mouth precious to Steve. _To have and to hold,_ the slogan says, _buy war bonds._

He wouldn’t usually paint this way, but now, when every soldier he paints seems to bear Bucky’s face, he often starts with the details of expression. Once he gets that right, he can move on to the larger areas of color, a rather backwards way of working. Today, he’s managed a forcefully triumphant expression, a bit more earnestly patriotic than Bucky himself ever quite mustered, and has moved on to washing in the red, white, and blue of the flag. 

When he works like this, he barely notices the rest of the world. Not out of fierce concentration, but the repetition of habit, of his awareness narrowing down to the stroke of his brush. So, he only hears the scraping of the door as it opens, not the footsteps that preceded it nor the creak of the lock. He looks up, jolted out of concentration.

Bucky is, impossibly, bigger. The bulk of him fills up the doorframe, shoulders an unthinkable breadth, and as he steps into the apartment Steve can see the way his uniform cleaves closely to his body, snug at the waist and across his chest. “No,” Steve breathes out, standing up too fast so his chair clatters to the ground. “You weren’t due until Saturday.” It’s Thursday now, and Steve thought he had two more days of waiting.

“Changed their minds,” Bucky says, tilting his head to one side as he steps in the door. They’re still a distance apart, a stretch of floor between them, door open to the hallway behind Bucky. Steve takes the distance in two quick steps and throws his arm around Bucky’s neck, smashing their mouths together. Bucky kicks the door closed and pulls Steve tight, lifting him to his toes. Steve doesn’t mind.

When they pull away, Steve breathing hard, Bucky’s hat sits bumped too far back, his mouth open and pink. 

“You’re — you look good,” Steve says. Then: “You’re home?” Too much hope in his voice; he already knows Bucky won’t be here long.

Bucky nods, lifting his hat off to put it on the table. Underneath, his hair is newly shorn, much shorter than he wears it. “Today,” he says, “and tonight. I ship out first thing in the morning.” At that, Steve feels something collapse in his chest, like an asthma attack except he’s not even trying to breathe — can’t even try. One night.

“That’s all?” he says, finally. Bucky’s face crumples, his mouth going soft like he’s been holding himself tight and hard for months. 

“I know,” he says. “Let’s make it worthwhile, yeah?”

Bucky kisses him again, kisses him and kisses him, and his mouth leaves Steve feeling raw like a new, tender nerve growing in the dull pain of an old injury. He’d made himself ignore the way Bucky’s absence felt like he’d been sliced open, eviscerated; with Bucky back so unexpectedly his body doesn’t quite feel like it can keep up. 

They stumble together toward the bedroom, Steve tripping over his own heels and clutching to Bucky, the wool of his uniform rough under Steve’s hands. He starts to shuck it off before they reach the bed, unbuckling the wide leather belt and letting it fall to the floor, kissing Steve while he fumbles at the buttons. Everything he wears, down to his shorts, is stiff — starch-pressed and new — and so unlike the suits he favors, with their gentle sheen and soft silk linings. 

Steve’s in his undershirt and shorts by the time they tumble together onto the bed, and Bucky just shoves the undershirt up, mouth hot on Steve’s neck, and fingers at his nipple. Steve feels, together, the rumble in his own throat at the groan that produces and Bucky’s teeth grinning against the tender skin of his neck, pleased. It never takes long to work up the wanting in Steve’s gut like this. The weight of Bucky’s body on his, pressing him down; the wet of his mouth; the teasing sharp play of his hand on Steve’s nipple: it all comes together in a knot low in his gut, makes him hard and keen. He’s heavier than he was, the bulk of his body fleshed out and made more solid by his training, and that new sense of his body sends Steve dizzy.

He hasn’t much experience with anyone else, since Bucky’s eclipsed that part of his mind since he was fourteen, or likely earlier in a fuzzy, nascent sort of way. But he thinks he’d be embarrassed, were it anyone else who saw him like this, wriggling and desperate, muffling the noise his body wants so badly to make as best he can. It’s Bucky, though, who keeps one hand tucked under his side, anchoring him; Bucky, who ruts up against him at the same time, cock dragging over Steve’s thigh through two layers of cotton. 

“I — I wanna —” Bucky says, pushing his hand down between them. Steve nods, open panting mouth meeting Bucky’s cheekbone as he bows his head, as he curls his body away enough to shove his hands into Steve’s shorts then falls back onto him, weight pressing them together so they can only rub gracelessly and frantically together, Bucky’s hand curled artlessly around Steve’s cock. 

Bucky’s breath stutters in Steve’s ear. He grasps Bucky’s thigh, under the hem of his shorts and in the crease where it’s warm and damp, and shoves them harder together. Bucky’s thighs clench and tremble, and in Steve’s ear he gasps, hoarse. He comes first, rutting against Steve’s thigh, and it’s so much: the heaving of his chest, the feeling of his soundless mouth wet and open against Steve’s neck. Steve tumbles over, coming in Bucky’s hand and kissing him hard and fierce. 

It’s not their most artful fuck or even, really, their most satisfying. But for a long moment, feeling the solid, present weight of Bucky draped over his chest and the heaving of their breath together, Steve feels something close to calm. 

++

For his last evening, Bucky wants to go to Queens to visit the Stark Expo. It’s not at all what Steve expected, but when Bucky waggles the newspaper in front of him and says, “It’ll be just like a comic book!” he can’t help but get excited. 

It doesn’t disappoint once they’re there. Around them, the sky lights up and glitters with neon-blazed signs and fireworks, and the air is heavy with the smell of popcorn and sugar. The crowd moves organically, weaving this way and that, and chatters and laughs and shouts. Steve hasn’t spent time in a crowd like this in months. It’s nothing like the earnest but small rallies the socialist art students kick up, which tend to be more determined and less gleeful. The dizzying, cacophonous press disorients him at first, but Bucky’s mindful stride finds a path through and keeping at his side lets Steve’s mind settle and enjoy the riotous crowd people around them. 

At booths, confident men in suits and wide-smiling women in dresses a touch too short try to sell everything from elixirs to carpet cleaners to miracle knives that will cut anything. Many people get swept into watching demonstrations, but Bucky ignores them all as he leads Steve toward the main pavilion. As they get closer, a booming voice welcomes them over the loudspeaker to _the world of tomorrow._ Inside, spotlights show off model rockets and planes, protective suits and an automated washing machine.

They arrive just in time to see Howard Stark step onto a stage occupied by a sleek chrome car and a team of showgirls. Steve’s seen his face in the newspaper before, but photographs don’t capture the way his grin lands flirtatiously on women in the front row, the way his laugh at his own not-quite-flying car charms the whole room into laughing with him. To his credit, the car does hover a bit before falling; in that long moment the whole crowd holds their breath, and Bucky reaches for Steve’s hand. They clutch their hands together for a long moment before it falls, both of them caught up and the crowd around them heedless to anything but what’s on stage. 

After the car, Stark stays on stage to explain the other exhibits, boosting his own peerless skills in making prototypes that very nearly work. Bucky leans into Steve’s space, childlike grin on his face, and says, “We need hot dogs,” like they’re the only thing that could make the night better. Bucky goes to fetch them, happy that Steve wants to stay and look more closely at a protective red bodysuit in one of the displays. 

It’s proposed as the armor of the future, but Steve can’t help but laugh at the thought of a whole group of soldiers wearing body-tight costumes, bright red and shiny. Seems like a fella’d be more of a target than ever, wearing that, he thinks. He lifts his gaze, scans the pavilion to see what other near-marvels Stark has to present, when he sees a familiar recruitment poster across the way.

They’ve popped up all over the city: Uncle Sam, pointing outwards, looking stern. Here, it’s accompanied by an arrow, pointing left to indicate the recruitment building just across the way. 

Steve finds himself walking that way before he thinks about it. There’s something in his veins, something insistent that’s been pounding louder since Bucky showed up at the door today, and standing there alone in the crowd it’s nearly deafening, the thrumming in his blood. It’s a fair, he thinks; maybe he should try his luck. 

He’s on the steps going up towards the entrance when a hand on his shoulder jerks him back, forcefully enough that his fists go up out of instinct. It’s Bucky, though, with two hot dogs held together in one palm and a glower on his face. Steve lowers his hands. 

“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Bucky says. “Tonight? You have to do this _tonight?_ ” 

The strain of his voice knocks Steve windless. Bucky’s right, of course; it’s his last fucking night, and Steve was ready to walk right up those steps and go through all of it over again — the lying, the rejection — and then sulk all night because of it. “I’m sorry,” he says, shaking his head. “You’re right, I’m — I won’t.” 

Bucky’s mouth is tightly drawn, like he’s holding himself from saying anything more. After a moment, he exhales. “I was an idiot to think you’d stop,” he says, bitterly. “I thought, with me away, you’d feel —” he cuts himself off, but Steve knows what he meant to say. With Bucky gone, he’d feel the fear Bucky feels all the time; with Bucky gone, he’d change his mind about enlisting. 

He wants to say that he has. So badly, he wants that: to give that peace to Bucky. But he knows that the months apart have only sharpened the urge. Bucky showing back up, in his uniform with his broad-spread shoulders, only made Steve want so desperately to go with him. 

“I don’t —” Bucky starts, then cuts himself off, fists clenching. Steve doesn’t want to argue this again, doesn’t want to disappoint Bucky again. “You don’t have to prove anything,” Bucky says, finally. 

“That’s not —” Steve says, then stops. It isn’t, he doesn’t think. But at his protest Bucky looks at him like he can see right through him, the way he’s been looking at Steve when he lies or dissembles or shrugs off help since they’ve known each other. He doesn’t have any protest left that Bucky hasn’t heard, though. What he can’t explain, can’t quite seem to put into words, is the way it exists like another pulse, the need to do something; he can feel it jangle against his nerves whenever he’s awake. 

Instead of saying more, Steve takes one of the hot dogs from Bucky’s hand. “I won’t,” he says, once more. Bucky keeps looking at him, then swallows and looks away.

“Yeah, okay,” he says. “Let’s get some cotton candy after this,” he says, forcefully light. 

“Yeah,” Steve says, wishing he could tuck his body against Bucky’s, wrap his arms around him. “Yeah, let’s.”

+++++

June 1943, Brooklyn, New York

Walt brings a bottle of whiskey, two thinly-cut ration steaks, and, at first, an enigmatic refusal to discuss the reason he’s stopped by Steve’s right at dinner time. With Steve’s permission, he steps in the kitchen to heat a frying pan, unwrapping the steaks to give them some salt. Steve’s dinner will be vastly improved by the meat; without Bucky there to help, his meals grow monotonous. He adds another potato to the one he’s cut up and sets the pieces to steam. 

“Are you going to tell me why you’re here?” Steve says, as Walt watches butter melt in the frying pan. 

“Once we’ve eaten,” Walt says. “Pour us some wine?”

Steve fills two tumblers, and leaves them on the counter while he sets the table. After a moment’s hesitation, he pulls out linens: Ma’s tablecloth with its delicate tatted edge, a set of flour sack napkins in faded florals, the shabby trivet Rebecca crocheted out of scraps. Years ago, he might have been embarrassed to have Walt there, a Columbia professor with an eye for beautiful and fine things. Today, though, he just sees the home he and Bucky have built, and the holes Bucky’s absence leaves.

True to his word, Walt doesn’t say much more than small talk as they eat. These days, the war qualifies as small talk, though, and eventually they get around to the actions in North Africa, where Steve thinks Bucky might be, based on small things in his letters.

“It must be hard, having him gone,” Walt says. Steve shrugs, with the habit he uses at the grocers and news agent’s, with all the people who think he’s Bucky’s roommate. Walt just looks at him, expression placid. Steve thinks about a million small things, everything he already knows about Walt and what he’s fairly certain all that means.

“I miss him,” Steve says, then. “All the time, all the time.” He fingers the edge of the tablecloth, thinking about what it’d be like to have Bucky there, sitting next to him at the table, relaxed and happy to play host. Bucky had met Walt a handful of times, had always got on, but it would have been different like this, at their home. “The place seems empty without him.” 

Empty seems like such a shallow word for what the apartment feels: pulled apart and hollowed out, the air too stale and quiet. Bucky’s letters come infrequently, and arrive weeks after they’re dated. Even then, the text is so careful, so coded, that Steve feels he can barely recognize the voice he loves so much in them. 

Walt’s nodding, seriously. “I’ve never — built a life, like that, with someone.”

“Why haven’t you?” Steve asks. It’s more than he should, he thinks, but — well. He can feel the ground between him and Walt shifting, the familiar way they interact as supervisor and assistant start to move into something more like friends. 

Walt doesn’t answer right away, propping his chin on one fist and frowning. “At first I just — I concentrated on school, on getting through and getting myself somewhere I could make a living at it. Later I figured out that it would always be something I’d have to hide, and, well —” he shrugs, giving Steve a resigned look that’s totally unfamiliar on his usually-determined face — “it didn’t seem that important. I’m alright on my own.”

Sometimes Steve wonders what his life would be if he hadn’t met Bucky. He understands what Walt means. “Bucky and I, we’ve — I was eleven when we met,” he says. “He’s always been —” Steve shrugs. By the way Walt’s nodding, it somehow translates. He looks sad, somehow, and Steve worries that he’s been a jerk, that Walt’s feeling like he missed out on something and Steve’s there, rubbing his face in it. 

But then Walt says, “Yeah, I figured. That’s why I wrestled with — with telling you what I’m about to tell you.” He leans over to take a file folder out of his briefcase, setting it on the table but leaving it closed. “I’ve been commissioned,” Walt says. 

Steve’s stomach drops. Is that what Walt came here to tell him? That he’s off to the war, and Steve’s out of a job, and the work they’ve been doing will go no further than a stack of carefully-compiled lists? “Oh,” Steve says, unable to keep the disappointment from his voice.

“Wait,” Walt says. “Let me tell you it all.” He flips open the file folder, pulls out the top sheet. Before handing it to Steve, he says, “You remember my friend up in Boston, George? George Stout?” Steve nods; he hasn’t met the man, but one carbon copy of every list he types gets sent up to him. “He finally got through to them. The government has created a new section of the military, in cooperation with all Allied governments, to identify and protect monuments and works of art in danger.” Walt slides the paper across to Steve.

It’s a letter, still creased from its envelope, on the letterhead for the School of Military Government at the University of Virginia. Steve scans it, not reading too closely, but picks up that it’s inviting Walt to join a section training officers to provide guidance regarding monuments and artworks in Europe — provided he meet the qualifications for a commission. “That’s great,” Steve says, mostly meaning it. “This means they’re taking it seriously.”

Walt nods, takes the letter back. “Am I right in assuming you’ve tried to enlist?” he asks. Steve feels a blush color his cheeks, but he holds his head proud as he nods. “Your Ma died of tuberculous, didn’t she? That’s enough to reject you.”

It’s kindly said, but it still sends Steve’s bristles up. It’s not Ma’s fault. “Asthma,” he says, “Scarlet fever, scoliosis, anemia —” he ticks each off on his finger, giving Walt a shrug. That’s not even all of it, and — as any number of military doctors have now told him — any one of them would be enough. 

Walt looks, perhaps, a little startled. He wipes his hand across his mouth, like he’s stalling for time. “If they’d take you, though, you’d —”

Steve nods. “In a heartbeat.” 

Walt opens his file folder again, slides another paper across the table to Steve. It’s identical to the last letter, it seems, except — “I gave them your name, too. When George sent around for possible volunteers.” 

The letter is addressed to Steve. “If I’m a 4-F for enlistment they’re never going to commission me,” he says. No matter how thrilling it is to see his name, there, it’s meaningless. 

“That’s the thing,” Walt says. There’s another piece of paper in his file, and he lifts it, hesitating a moment before handing it to Steve. “I have very few strings to pull,” he says, “but I gave them all a good sharp tug.”

The paper is heavy, uncreased. In filigreed letters across the top curl the words The President of the United States, and below that marches rows of cursive text. He doesn’t have to read it to know: he’s seen a near-identical document in the small case of his father’s things, declaring his Captaincy in the U.S. Army. Here, now, though, his own name is typed in the open blanks.

_To all who shall see these presents, greeting:_

_Know Ye that, reposing special trust and confidence in the patriotism, valor, fidelity and abilities of_ STEVEN GRANT ROGERS, _I do appoint him a_ SECOND LIEUTENANT _in the Army of the United States to rank as such from the twenty-seventh day of June, 1943. This Officer will therefore carefully and diligently discharge the duties of the office to which appointed by doing and performing all manner of things thereunto belonging._

“You’ll have to make it through Basic,” Walt warns. “But the commission is yours if you want —”

“Yes,” Steve says, before Walt finishes. “Yeah, I do.” 

Walt smiles, a crooked, familiar grin. Leaning across the table, he picks up the whiskey, which they hadn’t yet touched, and pours them both a generous couple of fingers. “We’re not the only ones fighting like this,” he says. Steve takes a sip of the whiskey, wincing a little at the burn. “But once we’re over there, it might feel like it. You’ll have to keep your wits about you and remember why you’re there.” He tilts his head to one side, glass of whiskey tilting with it, and considers Steve for a moment. “Do you know why you’re going there?”

Steve nods. “I think — there are things that mean a lot to me. Objects, ideas. And that must be true for everyone.” Walt nods, but Steve feels something nagging at him. That’s not quite everything; it’s not just about the things themselves, it can’t be. “I just — I don’t like bullies,” he says, finally. “I don’t like people who think they alone get to decide what’s good and bad in this world. What stays, what goes — what people think.” 

With another of his slanted grins, Walt drinks the last of his whiskey. “You’ll do just fine,” he says, pushing back from the table. “I’ll see you at training, Second Lieutenant Rogers.” Steve nods, his mouth suddenly gone dry. 

“Thank you,” he says, finally. 

Picking up his briefcase, Walt nods and tucks away his own letter. “Try and get some rest,” he says. “God knows you won’t have another chance for a while.”

+++++

February 1944, Monte Cassino, Italy

Geordie comes to in a hospital tent. After three weeks of bloody battle, the antiseptic tang on the air is welcome. Struggling to sit up, Geordie looks around him. The cots are full, crammed as tight together as possible, allowing only a narrow slice of floor between each for the nurses. Noticing him stir, indeed, one comes over to his bed.

“Take it easy, Private Giordano,” she says, one hand on his shoulder gently guiding him to lie back down. With just the effort of sitting for a moment, his head throbs, so he accedes. 

“How long have I been —?” 

The nurse consults his chart. “Two days,” she says. He wills her to say more, so he doesn’t have to ask. Instead, she replaces the chart and leans over him, peering at his eyes. Seemingly satisfied, she begins to step away.

“Wait — did we —?” 

She tilts her head, as though debating whether to answer. “Pulled back,” she says, finally. “The day you were brought in. Your division —” She looks down at her hands, held together in front of her. She’s neatly made up, white, pressed apron and all, but underneath it her blue dress is creased, the collar a bit rumpled. “It sustained severe losses. I’m sorry.”

++

A day later, Geordie has recovered enough to sit up in bed and eat. In comparison to the men around him, he’s sustained light injuries. A bullet through one thigh, taking with it a savage bite of muscle but missing major arteries; a lump on his head, likely sustained when he fell over from the bullet; and all the wooziness that comes along with both. Around him are men missing limbs, sometimes one, sometimes more. 

Late in the afternoon, Geordie convinces a nurse to let him sit on a bench outside the medical tent. “Just for some fresh air,” he says. The antiseptic smell that had been so welcome now coats his nose, his throat, threatens to choke him. There’s a quiet lull, and the nurse seems worn down by tending to men closer to death than he, so she allows it.

Not without a catch, as it turns out. As soon as she has him settled on the bench, she calls over a man passing by and assigns him as a chaperon. When Geordie sees that it’s McNaughton, a fella he sort of knows from C Company, he gives the kindly nurse a little more credit for her commanding voice. 

McNaughton settles down next to him, promising with a wink to watch him like a hawk. 

“You don’t really have to watch me,” Geordie says.

“And disappoint Nurse Lakeman? Then she’d never let me take her dancing.” He leans back on his hands and looks sidelong at Geordie. “You make it through the whole thing, or —?” He gestures to Geordie’s leg, where the bandage bulges out.

Geordie shakes his head. “Apparently not,” he says. “Enough of it, though.” He’d been shot on the morning of the third day, and by that evening the 34th Division had pulled out. Losses in the thousands; Geordie’s been too afraid to ask about any of the fellas he knows. 

From where they sit, they have a view of the monastery, up on the hill. It was one of their prime targets, and the 34th and other Allied forces had been converging on the Cassino area for coming on three weeks in an attempt to take it. Up there it sits, its fortified and white-washed walls bright even in the battle-dusted air.

“We’ll be bombing it soon, I reckon.” McNaughton has the kind of voice that perpetually seems assured. Geordie is never quite certain whether he really has some inside knowledge or just makes it all up; if something goes against his predictions, he’ll just shrug and say someone must have changed their mind.

“Surely they won’t,” Geordie says. It’s true that all of Italy seems made of antiquity, every building and archway and road centuries or millennia old. But the monastery on the mountain is grander than simply its age; it rises, like a crown, on the craggy rock, tenacious and gleaming. It’s also home to acres of libraries, full of old and fragile books. 

“We won’t be able to take it unless we do. You’ve been on the line, you know they’re shooting at us, from up there,” McNaughton gestures roughly to the mountain. He’s right. For weeks they’ve been climbing through the craggy hills of the surrounding area, dreading going over the top when they’d get taken out like kids shooting bottles on a ridge — pop, pop, pop. They’re nestled, precariously, in the lowlands right now, and even with their withdrawal the gunfire continues, staccato and precise. 

“We can’t just go around destroying decades of history,” Geordie says. His hears a pleading note in his voice, as though McNaughton actually has a say, and forces himself to take a breath.

He hadn’t ever thought this would be how he stepped foot in his grandparents’ land. Waterlogged in an amphibious landing, guns strapped to his thigh and across his back. Shooting at men who might be cousins. Back home, his parents clean graffiti off the windows of the deli on a regular basis now. Traitor, sometimes, and sometimes worse. 

“That’s war, Giordano. Whose side are you on?” McNaughton narrows his eyes at Geordie. Before Geordie can protest, McNaughton stands up and says, looking towards the monastery. “Take a good look,” he says, then, “You’ll be fine on your own, right?” He leaves before Geordie can even really answer.

++

In the morning, Geordie’s stable enough to earn himself a ticket home. He’s been on Italian soil for three weeks. “It won’t be until the evening at least,” Nurse Lakeman says, of his transport to the river where he’ll go by boat into the southern territory held firmly by Allied troops. From there, onto a ship and to New York. “You could sit outside again if you’d like,” she adds. 

It’s cold today, bitter wind biting through the canvas of the tents, but even freezing air is fresher than the sour stink of the medical tent. He wraps up in his coat and the mittens and stocking cap his sister had knitted for him. The stitches are clumsy, but they’re woolen and warm. He’ll see her again soon, he thinks, and finds he feels only joy. He should be ashamed, he figures, to be headed back after so short a time in the war, but he can only think how he wishes none of them were there at all, that Italy was still the place of his grandparents’ stories. Warm sun on vineyards, kitchens with flour ground into the countertops from generations of pasta-making, winding footpaths over fields interrupted by crumbling ruins. Not the wet stink of too many bodies, too much blood. 

The sun comes out for a moment. Leaning back, Geordie lets it fall across his face, warming his cheeks, and wonders if he’ll come back one day.

He hears, first, a shout, then the buzzing of airplanes. Another shout — unintelligible — and he stumbles to his feet, grappling by instinct for a gun he doesn’t have. But the bombers fly over their heads, and — 

When he hears the explosion he knows, somehow, to lift his eyes to the mountain, to the shining beacon at the top. One of its grand wings has already started to crumble, and then there’s another explosion, and another, and another, and as Geordie watches the mountain is overtaken by smoke and dust. Beneath his feet, the ground trembles as the edifice on the rock shatters and crumbles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Isn't that art _amazing_? Go give Cryo_Bucky some love on [tumblr](https://cryo-bucky.tumblr.com/post/179331082673/without-head-or-limbs-the-sculpture-could-seem) for it as well!


	3. Part 3

May 1944, Molise Region, Italy

Steve has been walking for miles. Feels like he could have crossed half of Europe by now; hell, the only guarantee he’s still in Italy is that he’d headed away from the sun and it’s a peninsula. This would be a hell of a lot easier if he had some transport, he thought, not for the first time.

Still, at least he’s not still twiddling his thumbs at HQ in Naples. He, Walt, and a couple other MFAA men had landed in Italy in late February, just in time to hear that the US had bombed the fifteen-hundred-year-old monastery at Monte Cassino — the birthplace of the Benedictine order — and, rather than wiping out Nazi sharpshooters, had killed some two-hundred civilians sheltered there. On top of that, German paratroopers landed in the rubble and managed to hold the region from February until just a few weeks ago. 

Their first missions didn’t take them much further than a few miles around Naples, looking in on churches and checking the bases of monuments for damage. There in the south, damage had been done but was already in the clean-up process; Steve couldn’t help but feel, at times, as though he was on some odd Grand Tour, taking in the ancient sites. Only, he carried with him a sheaf of official papers rather than a sketchbook these days. 

Finally, though, when the Allies broke the Gustav line, he and the other MFAA men had gotten their orders: each of them a region to cover, on their own, with whatever support they can muster after convincing squadron leaders within that area. Walt and Deane Keller, as the ranking Captains, each were issued a vehicle, while Steve, a lowly Second Lieutenant, and Lieutenant Kent were issued battered bicycles, salvaged from nearby towns and in poor repair.

Steve’s didn’t last a week. He learned quickly enough to repair it — to refit the chain that fell off every few miles, to patch the worn-thin tires, to tighten the handlebars that seem to wiggle loose at one wrong glance — and he found himself growing fond of it. Well, if not fond, at least tolerant. It did leave him winded and wobble-legged, but at least on the flat ground it was a boon. 

Unfortunately, very little of Italy is flat ground. That, in the end, was the bicycle’s downfall. Pursuing a fourteenth-century statue of San Felice in a village in Molise, Steve had tucked the bicycle up against a crumbling wall at the base of the hill upon which the little town perched, and continued upwards on foot, unsure as he was about his ability to keep momentum up the incline. The statue, alas, had sustained bullet damage, and as Steve tried to ascertain when the damage occurred from the local priest, a strafing hail of bullets sounded. 

Poor San Felice had been wounded in a battle only two days before, as it turned out, a battle that was, in fact, not entirely over, simply moving slightly westward. And indeed, Steve’s precious bicycle met the same fate as San Felice, and Steve was not equipped to bring the two halves of her back together.

So for two weeks he’s been on foot. The roads in the region are chewed up, plowed through by tanks and heavy troop carriers and hundreds of thousands of infantry on foot. The softening of spring turns them to sucking mud, ripe with the scent of everything that has passed over them in the recent days, and everything that has defecated upon them during the same. Steve keeps to the edges as much as he can. 

In his pack, he carries a stack of papers: lists of works of art, major architectural features, archives, and monuments within his assigned region, some of them his own contributions so many months ago. They’re deeply familiar, in that way, the thin carbon-copied paper just like those he’d typed on himself. So far he’s spent more time traveling between towns than evaluating objects, but the list has a few annotations beginning to spread across its surface. Details of the damage carefully noted; date of the damage — or destruction, in some cases — ascertained; suggestions made to local liaisons detailed. 

Today, the sun has dried out the crusty top layer of road, giving him a relatively stable surface to tread, and he seems far enough from action that the road, too, is deserted. It’s seen action recently, though, as evidenced by the trees all along the roadway. Many are sheared off at the top, others splintered into bits, and very few have escaped without at least some pockmarked bullet holes. Unattached to a specific battalion, Steve often finds himself without knowledge of the current state of the front line, or how near he is to it. All he can do is hope and wheedle information out of other soldiers when he encounters them. 

As he walks along, thinking about the monastery he’s aiming to evaluate today, a glint of sun off metal catches his eye. Diving to the side of the road, Steve crouches near a ragged hedge and peers into the distance. It’s near useless; Basic might have made him a bit stronger, but it’s done nothing to improve his eyesight. Nothing else seems to be forthcoming, though, so he cautiously stands and continues to walk. 

Cresting a small hill, he sees the glint again, but this time he’s close enough to tell that it comes from a vehicle, stationary in the road. While it could have a driver — could have a full compartment of German soldiers, in fact — Steve takes the fact that it’s not moving as hope that it doesn’t. Indeed, as he nears he can tell that it is a US Army Jeep rather than a German vehicle.

It’s been — well, abandoned is probably the most charitable term. It lists precariously to one side on a flat tire, and the rear bumper has been completely wrenched off. Bullet holes pepper the driver’s side where the door is wrenched open, the interior streaked with blood. With caution, Steve steps up to the driver’s side and peers further in. Luckily, beyond the blood he finds no sign of its former inhabitants. No keys either, but that might not be a problem.

Reaching under the steering wheel, Steve feels around for the wires. He’s never actually done this, but in the down time in Naples he spent a bored afternoon in the Allied vehicle fleet garage, a commandeered warehouse, where an equally bored Staff Sergeant let him poke around the engines a bit, pointing out the various parts and connections until Steve had a good general idea of how to get a thing to go. After a lifetime living in Brooklyn, where the closest they got to driving a car was Bucky staring covetously at the bright, shiny things they’d see driving down Park Avenue, having his hands in the guts of an engine was a whole new world. After a few minutes’ fiddling, Steve strikes two wires together and is rewarded with the grumbling roar of the engine awakening. 

He could dance, right there, he really could. Instead, he steps back and takes a look at the flat tire, then hauls off his pack to find his bicycle repair kit. It ought to do the trick, and if it doesn’t Steve’ll keep trying.

++

Two hours later Steve clatters into the tiny town next on his map. Driving through the single town square, he sets off to find the Monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno, which houses a remarkable set of ninth-century frescoes and a less remarkable, but old and therefore precious, twelfth century wooden crucifix. Coming down what he thinks is the right road, though, his way is blockaded by a group of soldiers bustling around a wretched-looking open-back truck. 

As he gets closer, Steve can see that they’re loading massive building stones into the back, gray and rough-edged like many of the ancient buildings around here. Very like, in fact, Steve thinks as he approaches. He slows to a stop, the exhaust of his Jeep popping like gunfire. That draws some attention, the men stopping to glance at him before returning to hauling stones into their troop carrier. 

Getting out, Steve walks around the vehicle and follows them to the source. It is, as he suspected, the rather fine front wall of the monastery garden.

“Stop!” he shouts, stepping in front of two men carrying a large stone. They stumble, rearing back a little, then, seemingly deciding that he is not impressive enough in rank or stature, move forward. Steve holds his ground, until the stone knocks against his chest and they realize he won’t move. 

“Get out of the way, officer,” one of the men, a Lieutenant, said. 

“This monastery was built in the eighth century,” Steve says. “You can’t just tear it down as you please.” 

The Lieutenant blinks at him. “It’s already been bombed,” he says, shifting his weight as though ready to barrel right through Steve.

Steve clenches his fists at his sides. “Then,” he says, gritting his teeth a little, “it needs evaluation and protection. Not wholesale destruction.” 

The second man laughs, a harsh bark. “Who the hell’s gonna do that?” he says, looking at the rest of the men with a slightly cruel grin. 

“I am,” Steve says. He reaches in his pocket for papers. “Monuments Officer Second Lieutenant Rogers. Tasked with evaluating and preserving objects and places of cultural importance. Like that monastery,” he adds, stubbornly. 

“You’re a what?” the Lieutenant says. The second man shifts a little. His knuckles, gripping the underside of the large stone, have turned white. 

Steve smiles pleasantly. “A Monuments Officer, sir.” He holds up the paper he’s taken out of his pocket: Eisenhower’s proclamation on monuments and war. It’s been universally distributed among Allied forces. “As you’re no doubt familiar, the Supreme Commander’s orders are only to disturb historic monuments in cases of necessity.” The Lieutenant shifts again, mouth pursed. “Do you want to explain why this demolition is of military necessity, rather than convenience?” He says it mildly enough, but the sting is there. Even if the Lieutenant doesn’t value the monastery, he does value his time not spent doing paperwork. 

With a glare, the Lieutenant gives a short, sharp nod and begins to walk back toward the monastery, still carrying the building stone. They settle it back in place on the wall, then he orders his men to return the rest of the stones they’d removed. Without a word to Steve, they climb into their troop carrier and drive off.

The wall does look sad, half-bombed and jagged, but Steve still surveys it with pride.

+++++

June 1944, Caprarola, Italy

“All together, now,” Steve says, fixing his grip more firmly on the base of the sculpture. Next to him stands a woman with a worn red scarf tied around her hair and, on the other side, the town’s priest, all of them close enough to brush elbows. They need as many hands as necessary, for the statue, though carved in wood, is adorned in iron and not easily lifted. “Andiamo,” Steve says, and as one they lift.

It’s slow going across the square, the group of them scuttling sideways like a crab, with Mary lifted up above them. Most of the gilding has worn off her halo in the centuries she’s stood on the square, but slivers of it still glint in the sun. If he looks up, Steve catches the Virgin full in the face, as she looks down beneficently, blissfully peaceful expression to her downcast eyes. In her arms, the baby Jesus sits too erectly, like an over-eager schoolchild, and lifts one chubby baby hand in benediction. His baby foot, peeking out of swaddling clothes once painted crimson, has been rubbed shiny by centuries of prayers, the grain of the wood exposed. The blue of Mary’s cloak, too, has faded and chipped away, most present inside the deep crevices that represent draped cloth. She is beautiful, she is very old, but more importantly, she is beloved. 

Convincing the priest to move her indoors until the front moved more solidly away had not been easy. Unlike others he’s encountered who are resistant to his suggestions of care, the priest doesn’t seem patriotic, determined still that the Americans, not the Germans, are the invaders here, but rather devoted to the souls of his community. She has stood, he argued, on that same plinth in the same square for seven decades. Her watchful gaze has nurtured and comforted generations innumerable. 

Steve is not inclined to disagree, and yet — the front line is a mere mile away, the booming of artillery shaking the mortar from between the bricks of buildings all through the area. She is beautiful, she is beloved, and Steve would see her survive to comfort another generation. 

Once at the church doors, they carefully maneuver their bodies around the lintel post and down the nave to a small side chapel. Its window glass has long since been blown out, the holes covered with canvas, but it has thick, solid walls. As one wobbling group, they bring the statue’s base to the ground.

Without her plinth, she is just Steve’s height, the bowed crown of her head precisely in his eye line. Her features are delicate, her body lithe and attenuated in that Gothic way. The studious part of his brain reminds Steve that this is one of the remarkable things about her — made by French artists visiting the area, she has the long, otherworldly lightness more common in the northern Gothic style than what one might more typically find this far south. Watching the way the villagers step back, shaking out their cramped hands, and gaze at her, brought to earth, as if with new eyes, he forgets all of that and sees only her enduring succor.

Together, they stack around her base a blockade of sandbags. As they place the last few, Steve hears the whir of airplane engines and, before he can fully register the sound, a great, enormous explosion shakes the ground. The Mary trembles but holds her ground. Another bomb falls, this time closer, and the priest moves quickly, ushering them to a door at the corner of the apse. “Alla cripta,” he says, opening the enormous latch and pushing it open. Beyond it, the beginning of a narrow staircase disappears into darkness. Steve fumbles for a flashlight, handing it off to the woman he’d lifted next to who now stands first by the door, and she takes it and leads them down into the depths. 

It’s clear, once they’re underground, that the crypt is familiar space to all but Steve. Filled already with cots and blankets, it smells not only of wet stone but of human inhabitance, sweat and warmth. Steve is ushered to a seat on one of the long, rough-hewn benches that line the walls as other villagers join them and someone sets about to make coffee. He accepts a cup; he can tell by the smell alone that it’s ersatz, made with bark perhaps. It’s warm, though, and sharply bitter. 

As more families join, Steve is thronged by kids, used already to the Hershey bars American soldiers give out. He does have a couple in his ration kit, so he breaks them into enough pieces so that every kid gets one. He doesn’t really know what to do with them after that; he’s never spent much time around children, not having any siblings. Becca, sure, but she was also so assured and careful, nothing like these kids that shove and shriek with, it seems, anger and delight all at once. Even after his chocolate is gone, the kids scramble around him, chattering in Italian too quick for him to follow and jostling to be nearest. He tries to answer their questions as best he can, leaving them giggling over his slow, overly formal Italian, and finally keeps them entertained by teaching them English words for things around them while they, in turn, tell him the Italian. They fall to giggles over the word “kettle” and take turns trying on his hat.

Finally, after half an hour has passed without the ground trembling, the adults meet eyes, coming to silent agreement, and two people go up the stairs first, opening the door cautiously. After a few minutes, they return with assurances and everyone picks up their handbags and coats to leave. 

Outside, it is, shockingly, still light, the sun low in the sky but still decidedly present, but much has changed. The church stands, but across the square, the stone plinth with its ring of haphazard wildflowers where Mary had stood is gone. Obliterated, entirely, leaving only a gaping hole with ragged edges, cobblestones intact and then crumbling, suddenly as though they make up the frayed edge of a carpet. A stunned, quiet silence falls. The priest crosses himself, then turns to Steve and grasps his hand, pumping it between both of his own. 

“Grazie,” he says, “Senza di Lei —” He shakes his head.

Steve can only respond, “Prego, prego,” feeling like it’s insufficient. Around him, people laugh and sigh as they take in their survival. It seems, looking around, as though little of the rest of the village has been directly hit. Even Steve’s Jeep, parked alongside the church, remains unscathed — or at least no more scathed than before. Folks begin to disperse, to return home, to check on friends and family who hadn’t waited out the bombing in the crypt. The woman with the red scarf, Alessandra, invites Steve to stay the night before he heads onward in the morning, and he gladly follows her and her two children down the street to a warm meal and a bed.

In the morning, before continuing on, Steve stops over in the church just to get a glance at the Mary one last time. In the side chapel, she still stands, rising up above the sandbags and giving her soft glance gently downward in the direction of the altar. On impulse, Steve reaches out and touches the baby Jesus’s foot, with a familiar pull of something in his chest. It’s not quite faith, he doesn’t think; he’s never had the piety he observed in his neighbors at Mass, but there is a comfort in the familiar peacefulness of her expression. 

“I heard there was an American in town,” a voice sounds from behind him, just as he’s pulling his hand away. He feels a slight embarrassment, like a child caught doing something silly, but wills it to fade as he turns. Behind him, a woman glances him over appraisingly, her arms crossed and mouth tilted up slightly, as though in private amusement. She wears a British field uniform, with trousers and a short jacket, but the insignia on her collar is unfamiliar to him. 

“Uh, yes ma’am,” he says, completely uncertain if he should salute or not. She stops his deliberation by holding one hand out.

“Agent Carter,” she says as they shake.

“Second Lieutenant Rogers.” She’s taller than him, and broader, and holds herself with self-assurance. “Were you looking for me?”

She shrugs, not a yes, not a no. “Curious, is all,” she says. “I’d heard they’d gone ahead with the — what do you call it? — the MFAA. Hadn’t met any of you fellows yet.” It feels like there’s something more than curiosity in her glance. Under the mildness of her expression, he can feel appraisal. 

“Half a dozen of us in Italy,” he confirms. “More being trained up for the rest of the Continent if — when we have better footing.” 

The corner of her mouth twitches. “Soon enough,” she says, and it sounds more assured than merely hopeful. _Agent_ Carter, she’d said; Steve wonders what exactly that meant. “I won’t keep you,” she says briskly, after a pause. She glances between him and Mary, something softening in her expression for a moment. “Keep up the good work,” she says, more earnestly than he expected, and he can only nod, feeling a bit dumbfounded. 

She leaves the church; by the time the sound of her footsteps has ended he’s already wondering if he imagined her.

+++++

July 1944, Azzano, Italy

Steve winds his way across Perugia, trying not to take notice of the dug-out vineyards, criss-crossed with empty trenches. The roads are hard going, ripped up and rough, and it takes him hours to reach his next stop, the tiny town of Azzano. The Allies have been pushing against the Gothic Line, and rumor is that they’re close to breaking through. Passing through the barren countryside to check off items on his list, Steve knows urgently that the inhabitants need this breakthrough as much as the Armies. More and more, he must cross off pieces on his list as destroyed; more and more, he avoids circumstances where locals will feel obligated to feed and house him. They don’t have enough for themselves, and nothing can be sown in the fields, filled with discarded artillery and barbed wire and worse. 

Yesterday, he’d been in Spoleto, documenting damage to the extensive city archives. The oldest section had burned, taking with it civic records going back a millennium. Before that, a baptistery in Messanano, ninth century, leveled by a bomb. Before that, he’d spent a week in Terni sorting through the rubble of the heavily-bombed city, trying to scrap together a record of which churches perished entirely and which left behind fragmented altarpieces or a sculpture here or there. A massive equestrian monument in the center of town had been blown right off its pedestal, the horse’s head caved in.

He’s only been in the war a few months, but the people here, and their buildings and objects and lives, have had a long, bloody war. 

He thinks he sees Azzano up ahead. It has a characteristic cream-plastered church, flanked by an older stone bell tower. Both, miraculously, are still standing. Steve feels a fleeting beat of hope in his chest.

Parking the Jeep, Steve approaches the church. The piazza is quiet, no hint of human life around. The heavy wooden door swings open to his touch, but as he enters, expecting a dim interior, he’s greeted by the same unforgiving sun that beat down on him outside.

Beyond the front facade, the entire church is bombed out. The roof a gaping hole, the walls crumbling down to rubble that coats the interior floor, mixing with shatter pews and jagged columns. Steve takes a raw, ragged breath. Feeling his knees shake a little, he reaches for the nearest column, pressing his palm against it. At the pressure, the top stone tumbles off, but the rest of the column holds. Pulling his hand away, Steve shakes himself, rattles his shoulders and pulls them up and back, and looks down the nave. 

According to his documents, here in the church he should find: a side chapel with a shrine containing relics of the finger bones of Santa Veronica Giuliani; an altarpiece featuring the Annunciation in carved and painted wood; an embroidered altar cloth said to have been stitched in the eighteenth century by a cloistered novitiate who saw visions of the Archangel Gabriel; and, in the apse, a Last Judgment fresco by, unusually, a Florentine artist. When compiling the lists back in New York, Steve remembers marveling at the way people and objects moved, that in the sixteenth century the Florentine style of Michelangelo and his followers would be so renowned that even Tuscany’s frequent rival in trade and war, Umbria, would commission its artists. Being here, he sees the way such stories attach to objects and become points of pride, connections to a world much wider than this little hamlet.

The world is much wider, and more cruel, and it has brought him here, to the silence of this half-destroyed church, to salvage what he can. First, the small chapel, east of the nave. To get to it, he has to walk over layers of debris. Wood cracks under his feet and shattered terra cotta shingles shift as he steps on and over them, leaving his gait ungainly and slow. He can tell where the chapel once stood, a semi-circular space protruding out from the rectangular nave, but any decoration it once held is broken. Strangely, all along its rough edges his sees black scorch marks, though nothing in the chapel seems to have burned. He sets that aside in his mind and kneels down to dig. Shifting through the shattered pieces of stone and brick and wood, Steve searches for a reliquary, hoping to see a glint of gold or glass. 

He digs, through rubble and dust, so much dust that it kicks up and makes his chest lock up, and digs more. In the debris, nothing glimmers. Finally, something lodges in his throat and makes him cough, violently enough that he has to sit back on his heels, one hand to his mouth and the other holding his stomach. It’s only then that he notices he’s been digging until his fingertips bleed.

There’s an irony in it that turns his cough into a laugh, miserable and retching: to be digging for the finger bones of Santa Veronica Giuliani, who was so holy she received the stigmata, until his own hands bled. Nothing holy about these wounds, though, he thinks, wiping them as best he can on his dusty trousers and struggling to stand. He pulls out his list. The Reliquary of Santa Veronica: presumed destroyed.

Making his way through the church, he finds the space where the altar should be. Steve keeps his eyes trained resolutely down, not allowing himself to gaze upward through the jagged walls to the sky beyond. The altar he finds, cracked down the center and listing inward like an ancient, sea-carved valley. It, too, has the same scorching, coal-black marks right down the middle where it’s cracked open. He runs his fingers over it, jerking his hand back when he feels a strange shock. The tips of his fingers seem, for just a moment, bright blue, before he blinks and they’re marked with only ordinary black soot. Touching the altar again, nothing happens. 

The altar cloth he does not see, but it likely is removed between services and stored with the communion wares. Walking around the altar, he holds his breath. Perhaps this town, like many others, took down their precious altarpiece and hid it somewhere — in the crypt or the cellar of the priory. 

Azzano has not been so lucky. Behind the altar, the altarpiece lies splayed open, its hinged wings cracked and akimbo, and spread across its surface a jagged spiderweb of crevices tear asunder the Annunciation scene, Mary on one side and Gabriel the other, both fragmented and looking small and mournful, flayed apart. Just in the center, where ordinarily the Holy Spirit would float between the heavenly figure on one side and the earthly on another, is a soot-blackened crater. It’s as though is has suffered some blast, but from what weapon Steve doesn’t know. He kneels next to it, running his fingers over the head of Mary, carved in deep relief, and feels for further damage. She breaks off in his hand, at even such a light touch. 

Steve’s eyes sting. He has seen worse, he thinks. This can yet be repaired. But as he stands and lets himself, finally, bring his gaze to the apse where generations of worshipers have looked upon Christ and been afraid, and been comforted, he knows the church is well past repair.

Where once stood a curved wall with stained glass windows, a domed ceiling, and soaring columns now remains only a rough, crumbled heap. It’s only a little taller than he is, dusty and fragmented, and behind it the harsh summer sky seems mockingly blue. He walks closer. Under the dust he can make out the remains of the fresco, once as blue as the sky beyond. Placing one hand on the wall, he brushes away a layer of debris and reveals beneath it the shocked, mournful face of one of the damned, judged by Christ and sent to the depths below. The expression, with its wide-open howling mouth, should shock him. That is its purpose: to bid congregants to think to their own sins lest they, too, be damned to eternal anguish. 

But Steve has seen the faces of the damned all across the countryside. There are those who great him with enthusiasm and joy, those who weather the war with steadfast stoicism, but there are also those undone by it. Those who stumble through their ripped-open towns with the shocked rictus of the damned; those who walk the Earth in shuddering pain as though they already bear the weight of Hell. That, Steve cannot repair, that his meager conservation tools are powerless against. 

Stumbling back, Steve finds his knees, again, wobble. He reaches out, but there is nothing — nothing to support him, nothing to bear him up. Instead, he collapses, falling to his knees. His head is so heavy, an unbearable, unfathomable weight, and he slumps against the wall, hands to his forehead, and feels himself sinking lower.

++

He’s not sure how long he sits there. His bones ache, deeper than they have with any rheumatic fever, and his eyes and throat burn. Dropping his head backwards against the wall, he looks upwards to a sky growing darker, heavy now with thunder clouds. He stands. The tasks at hand have not changed, just as they hadn’t in every other destroyed town he’s been through. He should find the priest, the mayor, any other town elders. He should arrange for protection of the remaining fragments of the fresco, for volunteers to search through the rubble for the reliquary, for a crate to carefully pack up the altarpiece and store it away until it can be repaired. 

Picking his way out of the church, he begins to hear voices — the first sign of other people since he arrived in Azzano. Stepping outside, he sees, first, a line of Red Cross vehicles moving along the road up into the town, then a small group of people conferring in the square. He makes his way over to them, thinking to see if he can find the parish priest. 

Rather than a clergyman, though, the first person to turn and catch sight of him is arrestingly familiar, though perhaps a little more tired from the intervening month. Agent Carter steps away from the group and walks over to him. “Second Lieutenant Rogers,” she says, with one eyebrow elegantly arched. “You’re perhaps the last person I expected to see here.” 

“I could say the same, ma’am — Agent —” Her mouth twitches at Steve’s stumbling reply, and he can feel his cheeks color up. 

Rather than correcting him, Agent Carter gazes up at the church facade. “What were your findings?” she asks, gravely enough that he suspects she already knows.

He shakes his head. “Bad, I’m afraid.” 

He thinks about the odd scorching, which he’s still trying to puzzle out, and thinks to mention it, but Agent Carter then says, “It was a bloody battle.” She looks at him again, no mirth left. “Very severe casualties, with over two hundred men captured after surrender.” She gestures down to the line of Red Cross vehicles, moving slowly into town. “The injured there are all that’s left of the 107th.”

It takes a moment before her words register, but then — “The 107th?” His heart races, thumping hard in his chest, and he reaches out as though to grab her arm. “Do you have a list of casualties?”

Agent Carter seems startled, but doesn’t hesitate to respond. “I can take you to the person who does.”

When the Colonel confirms that Barnes, James B. was on his list of condolence letters, Steve staggers back, nearly collapses. Captured, it seems: Missing in Action, the letter will say. On their way over to the tent, Agent Carter had said something about a retreat north with the prisoners. “What rescue efforts are in place, sir?” he asks. The Colonel stares at him.

“None,” he says gruffly. “I’m not risking another man on a hare-brained rescue effort that won’t succeed.” Steve wants to punch him, to shout; instead he grits his teeth down and leaves the tent without saluting.

On the wall behind the Colonel, there had been a map. Steve’s memory, sharp enough to get him the indexing job, has saved it picture-perfect in his mind, including a pin set into the Alps. He half-runs to his Jeep, tossing his pack into the back and swinging himself into the driver’s seat. Before he can reach under the dash to start it, Agent Carter steps up next to him, hands on the door well. 

“You’re going to drive to an undisclosed location in the Alps?” she asks. 

“I’d go on foot if I have to,” Steve says. The engine roars to life and he uncurls, looks at her. 

“Why?”

“My — my friend. My — I can’t just leave him there. Even if the rest of the fucking Army can, I can’t.” 

Agent Carter looks at him with level eyes. “I think I can get us there a better way,” she says finally, and turns on her heel, as though expecting him to follow. Where she’d gripped the edge of the Jeep, an indent the size of her hand remains. Steve stares at it for a long moment, then jumps out of the Jeep and runs to catch up. 

++

Up close, Howard Stark is not what Steve expected. He grins at both Steve and Peggy, making a joke about stopping off in Lucerne for fondue that Steve doesn’t entirely understand, but Stark’s generous and undiscerning wink makes fairly clear. There’s a part of him, below the deeply churning panic, that cannot wait to tell Bucky that his glorious Howard Stark is, indeed, a little bit bent. 

Steve’s never been in an airplane before, and it’s so shockingly cold that he can feel his teeth begin to chatter. Across from him, Agent Carter looks implacable, jaw set firmly. “You don’t have to —” Steve starts, uncertain of where he means to end. It’s his fight, he knows; there’s no reason Agent Carter should come along. Even as he thinks it, though, he thinks of her hand gripping tight to the edge of his Jeep, of the way her shoulder set like there’s nothing in the world that could move them.

She cocks her head. There’s something in the gesture that reminds him of Babe, when she’s looking at him like he’s being an idiot. “You’ll certainly die without me,” she says, noninflected. “If I’m there, you _might_ not.”

“That’s —” He closes his mouth. It shouldn’t be comforting at all, but it nearly is.

“Besides, Colonel Phillips is wrong. We should be trying to rescue those men, and if he won’t give the order —” She tilts one shoulder up, expressively. 

“Okay,” Steve says. “Can I ask — what — who —” He gestures to the insignia on her collar. Reflexively, Agent Carter reaches up and touches one.

“The SSR,” she says. It means nothing to Steve. “Let’s just say I know what it’s like to work a specialized mission for a small, underfunded and under-respected division.” Her smile to him, now, is genuine and even a little soft. 

“I’m glad,” he says, meaning it. “And,” he adds impulsively, “I’m Steve. In case we’re about to die.”

Agent Carter’s smile grows a little. “Peggy,” she answers. “It’s a pleasure.” Before they can add any more, Stark shouts back that they’re getting close, and Peggy tosses Steve a parachute pack. 

++

They don’t land near the base, but their timing is good enough: a convoy headed that direction drives by just moments after Peggy helps Steve wrangle out of his parachute. They wait in the bushes until the last truck is nearly upon them, then run out and swing up onto the rear bumper, Steve only scrambling a little. They roll into the back of the truck together, Peggy taking out two men before Steve quite recovers. He manages the man nearest him by the time Peggy has the rest of them down, though, and helps her toss their unconscious bodies out the back.

The convoy takes them right into the heart of the base, and they’re able to crawl out without detection and sneak into the nearest building. Peggy moves almost silently, her broad-shouldered body completely composed. 

Inside, the building is dim, and Steve can just hear the sound of people breathing and quietly moving. Peggy notices them first, cursing under her breath, and when Steve’s eyes properly adjust to the light, he sees stretched out before them a long line of barred prison cells, each holding half-a-dozen soldiers. 

They stand up as Peggy and Steve approach. Mostly Americans, by their uniforms, with a handful of British and Free French as well. He scans the cells nearest for Bucky, but doesn’t see him. 

Peering at the lock of the nearest cell, Peggy grasps the bars between her hands and, with a sharp, heavy movement, yanks the door free, busting through the lock. Steve’s pretty sure his jaw drops as much as the men now freed. “Fuck,” one of them says. “Where’d you learn to do that?”

“Finishing school,” Peggy says dryly, moving onto the next one. 

Steve stops the first group of soldiers. “Any of you know a Sergeant James Barnes? Is he here?” 

The lead guy, with a burly reddish mustache, glances at Steve then away. “He was taken to the isolation ward three days ago,” he says.

“No one ever comes back,” says a guy behind him, wearing the insignia of the 92nd Rangers. 

Steve tells himself not to panic, despite the growing knot in his stomach. “This way?” he asks, gesturing down the hallway. They nod, and Steve takes off. 

It takes a few tries before he finds the right door, wrong turns down long corridors, but when he shoves his way in he can hear Bucky’s voice, so sweetly familiar even though it’s only a murmur. 

In the center of the room is a table. Strapped to it with heavy leather belts, Bucky stares up at the ceiling, mouth moving ceaselessly. As Steve stumbles to a stop next to the table, Bucky’s eyes stare right past him. 

“Bucky — oh, god —” Steve yanks at the straps holding his wrists down. They’re tightly buckled and thick, and it takes some tugging before he gets the first one open. Grasping Bucky’s hand, Steve holds it to his mouth, allowing himself long enough to breathe one long sigh of relief. 

Something in the movement jerks Bucky back to the present, and he blinks and stares up at Steve. “Steve? What — you’re —”

“I gotcha,” Steve says, pulling on the second strap. This one is easier, and when it’s off Bucky sits up with a urgent jerk, pulling himself off the table, and falls against Steve. “I gotcha,” Steve says again, almost a sob, and Bucky makes a broken, pained noise against his chest. 

Steve helps him to his feet, then reaches up to cup his cheek. “You’re alive,” he says, and Bucky says, “You’re _here_.” 

“Yeah,” Steve says, laughing. “Yeah, I am.” He leans up to kiss him, knowing they need to hurry but needing, too, so badly to feel Bucky’s body solid and present against his own. 

“Don’t mind me,” Peggy’s voice says from behind them, and Bucky jerks back. She looks at them both, unsurprised, and then immediately turns her attention to the rest of the room. “You’ll want to get moving,” she says, unhurriedly. “They’re blowing the whole building.”

“What about you?” Steve asks, as he slips Bucky’s arm over his shoulders.

“I’ll be along,” she says, grabbing files off the laboratory counter tops and shoving them into her pack. She glances at Steve once more, a vial of vibrant blue liquid in one hand. “Go on.”

She’s right; half the building is on fire already. They’re a few stories up, on a precarious gangway, and underneath them flames lick higher and higher. There’s no way across that Steve can see except a girder that spans to the other side.

“You go first,” he tells Bucky, uncertain if it will hold both their weights. Bucky seems about to protest, so Steve says, “You’re injured. You go first.” He climbs up over the railing, taking a few cautious steps on the girder then, with more confidence, balancing his way across it.

When he’s almost to the other side, the metal creaks ominously. Bucky runs the last few steps and launches himself over the far railing.

“Shit,” Peggy says, succinctly, appearing just as the girder falls. Across from them, Bucky’s face collapses in panic, and he seems ready to climb back over the railing and fling himself back to them, as though that would do any good.

“Go!” Steve shouts across the chasm. At least Bucky can get out.

Bucky slams his hand against the railing, yelling, “No! Not without you!”

Beside him, Peggy says, “We’re going to have to jump.” At Steve’s bewildered glance, she shrugs and says, “I’ll help you.” Yanking on the railing, she pulls open a gap that they can jump through, and if Steve hadn’t already seen her bust open multiple locked cells with her bare hands he’d be shocked. Well, more shocked. She lines him up to the gap; they both take a few steps back then, with a deep breath and Peggy’s signal, Steve runs forward as fast as he can. Just at the edge Peggy comes behind him and shoves, tossing him across the gap. Flailing desperately, Steve can see Bucky’s terrified face get closer and closer and he reaches — reaches — feels his hands first then his chest slam against the iron railing. 

Bucky’s hands are all over him, hauling him over the railing then holding him close, Steve’s face against his chest, the two of the collapsed on the narrow walkway, breathing as one. A shout from Peggy brings them back, and they scramble upwards, out of the way, so she can jump across, with far less effort that Steve required. 

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Bucky says, and they start to make their way to a doorway, desperate for some exit. After running through a maze of corridors, Peggy finally slams open a door that leads to fresh air. Across the yard, freed soldiers are fighting off Germans to scramble into trunks and tanks, whatever vehicles they can find, and the three of them eagerly run toward the nearest truck. Bucky turns to look at Steve, checking in, and grins so wild and happy a grin that Steve could kiss him, right there, he thinks, and starts to smile back and then — and then —

A jagged pain rips through his stomach. He falls, he thinks — his knees on the ground — he can’t see — his hands are on his stomach but he can’t see, can only feel wet, pouring against his hands and he — he — he falls.

++

“This will —”

“You don’t know —”

“— the only —”

The ground rocks below him. There are words, swirling around the air above his head. He can’t see, it’s only dark — but then — Bucky’s face, above him, looking down. “You’re alive,” he wants to say. Not sure the words come out.

“This will hurt,” says another voice, one he thinks he knows now. Stabbing, icy pain in his arm — his shoulder — his chest — 

It goes black.

++

He wakes again. The ground is still this time, and above him is the top of a canvas tent. His head pounds like nothing he’s felt before but his eyesight is clear and sharp. Sitting up, he gasps, a wrench of pain tearing across his abdomen.

“Hey, easy now.” Bucky’s hand on his shoulder steadies him, and when he turns his head, there’s Bucky’s face, gray and worried and wonderful.

“You’re alive,” he says. Bucky laughs.

“I should be saying that to you, sweetheart.” He shakes his head, grim expression starting to clear. Steve wants to kiss him, can’t really turn his head enough to see if there’s anyone else in the tent. There must not be, because Bucky leans in and presses his mouth to Steve’s, fierce and hard. “You gave me a scare,” he says against Steve’s lips. 

“Just like old times,” Steve murmurs, though he can’t ever remember a time like this, waking up pained and miserable and feeling it, viscerally, start to clear. Already his head pounds less and the pain in his stomach dulls. 

“Yeah,” Bucky says, one palm against Steve’s cheek. He kisses Steve again, then rests their foreheads together. 

Steve’s chest still hurts, but somehow his breathing begins to ease. The tent flap rustles open, and they pull apart. When Peggy enters, they’re sitting a respectable distance apart, hands next to each other but not clasping. Steve begins to feel fondness for that unperturbed expression of hers, slightly lifted brows the only indication that she has any opinions on what she’s seeing at all.

“Glad to see you’re up,” she says. “Stark will want to check your vitals, but you’re certainly looking better than you were a few hours ago.” 

He wants to ask what happened, what caused the icy feeling that still haunts his veins. He remembers her voice, telling him it would hurt. It did, but somehow it nearly doesn’t, now. “I’m feeling better,” he says, a bit cautiously. 

“As soon as you’re ready to move, we can get you back to Naples. You’ll have to wait for transport back to America, but I expect it won’t take long.” Steve’s stomach sinks. “Unless —” Peggy adds, in a questioning tone.

Steve takes it. “There’s still work to do,” he says. “I’m not — there are so many works to be found, still.” Rumors of castles in the Alps and mines deep underground, of trains that take the best pickings of all of Europe’s collections and then disappear. He looks at Peggy, who smiles a little, as though that was precisely what she expected.

“It’s not my division,” she says. “But — I think I could make a case for mutual benefit, get you back out there.” She turns to look at Bucky. “After what you’ve been through, you’d be entitled to return home, too, Sergeant Barnes,” she says. Steve feels a fluttery panic — that’s what he should want, isn’t it; Bucky at home and safe?

But Bucky shakes his head. “Not done yet, ma’am.” His glance flits to Steve, then away; for a moment Steve wonders which of them is following whom, this time around.

She looks between them. “A reassignment, perhaps?”

Cautiously, Steve says, “I’ve done a lot on my own. But — a partner — it’d be helpful.” 

Peggy nods, giving them a small, quiet smile. “I’ll see what I can do.” She stands to leave. “You mind that wound, Steve. If you notice anything — strange — Stark should know about it.” she says. She’s looking at Bucky, though, and something passes between them. Bucky gives a small nod. 

When she’s at the entrance of the tent, Bucky says, “Agent Carter —” She pauses, looks back at them both. Steve wonders what else Bucky wants. “I reckon we could get even more done with a team.” He gives her that grin of his, that charming grin; Steve could tell him that it won’t work on Peggy at all. But she listens, one eyebrow slightly lifting. Bucky shrugs. “I know some fellas.”

+++++

1944, Altaussee, Austria

No light permeates this far below ground. Nestled deep in the heart of the mountain, miles of winding tunnels opening onto salt-carved caverns represent the life’s work of many a miner in the area. They don’t go down to the mine anymore, not now that it has been commandeered for another purpose. Tunnels that used to tremble with each gunpowder blast carving out more now stay silent and still. There has been no movement for many long weeks, and the new inhabitants of the mine sit silently, in orderly rows, on shelves and in crates. 

Some of the chambers have filled with water, the pumps that usually bring it out daily having gone quiet. The damp lurks, creeping at the edges of the mine’s new occupants, grazing over their surfaces. They are very old: not older than the earth and salt and iron around them, but older, some, than the man-carved spaces within it. Nonetheless, some of them could be undone by this damp, could peel and molder and rot away. If they could feel fear, they might. Used to feeling the warmth of candlelight and adoration, they might shiver in the dark solitude, if they could. 

Wrenched from their homes, from altars and chambers and walls of hallowed spaces, torn away from the people whose ancestors made them and who still revere and care for them today, they huddle together in miserable masses. Many — so many, more than a human eye could count — fill the spaces underground. Some are so renowned that their loss has mourners across the globe; others are missed only by a few. Nonetheless: missed, they are, all of them. 

In the dark and the quiet, they wait.


	4. Endnotes

Endnotes to Part 1

September 1937, Museum of Modern Art, New York  
1\. Steve and Ma go to see an exhibition of [Otto Dix prints at MoMA](https://www.moma.org/collection/works/portfolios/63259), in its first location in a Rockefeller-owned townhouse that would later be torn down for the new building, opening in 1939

September 1937, Munich, Germany  
2\. Gabriele is Gabriele Münter, a German Expressionist painter who, along with Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, was one of the founders of the “Blue Rider” group. The group frequently spent time at her home in Murnau, and it’s likely that her interest in folk art practices of the region, including glass painting, influenced other artists in the group. She was also first Kandinsky’s student then his partner, before he returned to Russia at the outset of WWI.

The “Entartete Kunst” exhibition, or “Degenerate Art,” was a blockbuster traveling show sponsored by the Nazi party showing works by modernist artists seized from the German national collections. The creation of the exhibition happened extremely quickly, with orders to museums to give up works happening in less than two weeks. Some museums resisted, by “misplacing” files or hiding works deep in collection stacks, but in the end some 16,000 works were amassed and 650 of those shown in the traveling exhibition. The “Degenerate Art” show was accompanied by a show of “good” art, which had far fewer people visit. After the show, a number of works were sold at rock-bottom prices at an auction in Switzerland; another 5,000 burned in the courtyard of the Berlin Fire Department in 1939; and countless others distributed to the personal collections of various Nazi officials, including Commander of the Luftwaffe and second most powerful Nazi leader Hermann Goering. 

The _Tower_ that was removed was Franz Marc’s [_Tower of Blue Horses_](http://www.franzmarc.org/The-Tower-of-Blue-Horses.jsp), recognized as one of his best works, taken from the Berlin National Gallery. After protests due to Marc’s death in WWI and subsequent Iron Cross award, the _Tower_ was removed from the Degenerate Art show, though other works by Marc (and, indeed, other German artists who died serving in WWI) remained. Goering then claimed it for his own personal collection. The _Tower_ has not been seen since 1945 and may or may not still exist.

Münter did keep a collection of works, mostly by her fellow German Expressionist artists including Kandinsky and Marc, at her house in Murnau. She managed to hide them from officials, who searched her home multiple times in the early years of the war. Her home is now [a museum](http://www.muenter-stiftung.de/en/the-munter-house/).

November 1938, Art Students League, New York  
3\. If you want to read the issue of the _New Masses_ Steve’s perusing, [here’s PDF](https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1937/v24n04-jul-20-1937-NM.pdf). I cheated a little — it’s from 1937 — but that Rockwell Kent cover can’t be denied!

May 1939, Third Annual American Artists’ Congress, Hotel Commodore, New York City  
4\. The American Artists’ Congress was founded in 1936 to bring together artists opposing fascism, and continued to meet until 1943. I’ve cheated a little on the dates here — a faction of leaders in the group tried to ferret out Communists in 1940 and, in the same year, voted to support US non-intervention after the German invasion of the USSR, leading to a major schism and eventually the group’s dissolution. Many of the names I’ve used were members, though the only one whose name still rings a bell is Meyer Schapiro, celebrated art critic of modernism. To read the proceedings of their first conference, including speeches by Aaron Douglas, Rockwell Kent, Margaret Bourke-White, and others, pick up _Artists Against War and Fascism_ , edited by Matthew Baigell and Julia Williams.

August 1939, Road out of Paris, France  
5\. In 1939, anticipating German invasion, the staff at the Louvre (as well as other prominent museums in France as well as the UK and US) [packed up and moved](https://twistedsifter.com/2013/05/louvre-and-mona-lisa-world-war-2/) huge amounts of the truly massive collection to chateaux in the surrounding countryside. (In the UK, most of the National Gallery collection was moved to mines in Wales, while in the US pieces from the National Gallery went to Biltmore and at MoMA staff removed paintings every night and replaced them every morning for the early years of the war, when there was fear of an eastern seaboard invasion). Curators accompanied works and stayed with them for the duration of the war. I based Marie on Frédérique Hébrard, the daughter of the Louvre curator assigned to the Mona Lisa, who describes going to look at the painting in her velvet-lined wooden case in the documentary _The Rape of Europa._ Marie’s painting is Eugène Delacroix’s [_Liberty Leading the People_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Leading_the_People) of 1830.

Museums and churches that were unable to remove objects, particularly in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Austria, and collections of individual Jewish families forced to flee or imprisoned in concentration camps, faced not only looting by individual soldiers but the systematized and authorized looting by Nazi officials for the personal collections of higher-ups and for Hitler’s Fuhermuseum. Planned for his hometown of Linz, the grand museum was to house the greatest collection of art on earth. The Nazi administration developed vast legal systems to justify their crimes, including, in the case of artwork, the establishment of the ERR (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, or Rosenberg Task Force), which gave Nazi official Alfred Rosenberg nearly unlimited power to seize any book, artifact, or cultural property under the guise of “proving” the inferiority of the Jewish people. In the end, political head-butting by Nazi officials in France meant that nothing except two middling German objects in the French National collections were actually seized by the Nazis; the Louvre collections were safe through the war. 

September 1939, Most Holy Trinity Cemetery, Brooklyn  
6\. The postcard Steve brings to Ma’s grave is Rosa Bonheur’s [_The Horse Fair_](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/435702), from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Endnotes to Part 2

January 1940, Columbia University History of Art Department, New York  
1\. I haven’t based Walt’s work on any specific works, but if you’ve never spent time with Byzantine icons, do yourself a favor and [take a gander](https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/icon/hd_icon.htm). All that gold!

March 1940, Columbia University Department of Archeology, New York  
2\. The sculpture is a torso fragment of a casting of what is known as the [_Apollo Sauroktonos_](https://www.getty.edu/publications/artistryinbronze/conservation-and-analysis/40-northover/), or Apollo Lizard-Killer, who is quite frankly a real hottie, and was so called because the sculptures often show him leaning against a tree with a lizard, or sometimes snake, climbing up it. The “original” work, a bronze version by famed Greek sculptor Praxiteles from the 4th century BCE was copied numerous times in marble by later Roman sculptors in the 1st-2nd centuries CE. This practice was very widespread; given that bronze could be melted down and reused while marble could only be reused with a loss of material, fewer of the bronze Greek works still exist. One bronze full-size version of the Apollo Sauroktonos exists, in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, thus my torso here is a fabrication.

3\. The “something about the Greek climate” that our smug archaeological grad students cite is from Johan Winckelmann, one of the “fathers” of art history. He wrote extensively on ancient Greco-Roman art in the 18th century, nearly single-handedly providing fodder for a neoclassical revival in art, and argued that the Greek climate and way of life lent itself to their appreciation of the athletic, aesthetic beauty so evident in their art. He was also hella gay and included in his visits to Rome to explore art many sojourns with young male prostitutes. Next time you think you’ve done something absurdly gay, ask if it’s as gay as writing multiple multi-hundred-page treatises on the pure, detached beauty of ancient art, restarting an entire neoclassical art movement, and founding an academic discipline all because you think all the statues of naked men are hot.

April 1940, Lyon, France  
4\. Julian and his family are fictional but based on many Jewish families who fled German invasion and tried, sometimes in vain, to store their precious objects safely. The genesis for this scene was the specific, and frankly very satisfying story of Monuments Man Private Harry Ettlinger and his grandfather, which [honestly needs to be a movie](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-last-of-the-monuments-men). In 1938 in Karlsruhe, Germany, Opa Oppenheimer showed his 12-year-old grandson his collection of art, including some minor Impressionist works and a locally-made print copy of a Rembrandt self-portrait in the Karlsruhe museum. Very soon after, the Ettinger family fled Germany for New York, one month before Kristallnacht. As a naturalized American citizen, Harry joined the US Army at 18, and eventually got assigned to work with Monuments Man James Rorimer as a translator. In that role, Harry helped liberate the Heilbronn mine where hundreds of artworks stolen by the Nazis were held, including the Rembrant self-portrait Harry had grown up near but never seen in person (as Jews were not permitted to visit the museum by the time he was an adolescent). Shortly thereafter, he got a letter from his Opa, now settled in New York, with the location of the storage warehouse where he stashed his art collection before fleeing Germany in 1939 (after, it seems, internment at Dachau). Harry along with Ike, a liberated concentration camp victim, drove to Karlsruhe and found the works, packaging them up and shipping them off to America. 

June 1940, Brooklyn, New York  
5\. As part of the New Deal, the federal and various local governments experimented with different agencies to fund artists, often in creating public works including photographs, murals, paintings, sculptures, and posters. Colloquially, these are often lumped under the WPA, the Works Progress (later Project) Administration, there were in fact a number of different agencies that overlapped, including the PWAP (Public Works of Art Project), the Section (Section of Painting and Sculpture), the FAP (Federal Art Project), and, particularly for documentary photography, the FSA/OWI (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information). Early iterations like the Section and the PWAP mostly funded known, already practicing artists, though for big projects students and other early-career artists could be hired on as assistants; later iterations including the WPA/FAP, and the concurrent FSA/OWI required less proof of previous success in order to get hired.

February 1941, Jackson Heights Station Post Office, Flushing, New York  
6\. The mural Steve works on is just such a project! I’ve fictionalized this version, though the Post Office in Flushing does have a [1940 Section-commissioned mural](https://livingnewdeal.org/projects/jackson-heightspost-office-mural-ny/) on the development of Jackson Heights. The references Steve makes, though, relate to two (in)famous destroyed or changed mural projects. First, the Diego Rivera mural for Rockefeller Center entitled Man at the Crossroads, which was ordered destroyed before completion by its commissioner, Nelson Rockefeller, due to changes Rivera made to the initial design. These changes depicted Rockefeller and other capitalists on the side of eugenics, racism, and warfare, as opposed to Communist and socialist leaders and workers on the other side. Rivera later [recreated the mural in the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City](https://www.diegorivera.org/man-at-the-crossroads.jsp), where it still exists. Ben Shahn, who worked as an assistant on Man at the Crossroads, and his wife Bernarda Bryson Shahn later received a number of WPA/Section commissions, including the [Bronx General Post Office murals](https://livingnewdeal.org/projects/bronx-central-post-office-murals-bronx-ny/), entitled Resources of America. He proposed to include a section of Walt Whitman poem: “To recast poems, churches, art, (Recast, maybe discard them, end them - maybe their work is done, who knows?” This received censure, and to avoid a scandal around the Section Shahn agreed to choose a different quotation: “For we support all / Fuse all / After the rest is done / and gone we remain / There is no final reliance but upon us / Democracy rests finally / upon us / (I my brethren begin it) / and our visions sweep through eternity.” 

June 1941, Island of Jersey, Channel Islands  
7\. In 1937, Dadaist artists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore moved from Paris to Jersey, in the Channel Islands, after many of their artistic and family ties in Paris finally ended. Cahun and Moore had met as teenagers and quickly formed a romantic relationship. After the death of Moore’s father, their parents married, making the twenty-somethings step-siblings. Both assigned female at birth, Cahun and Moore adopted those names as artistic, androgynous nom-de-plumes; while they both often used their birth names socially, I’ve chosen to use their chosen names as well as they/them pronouns for both here, to gesture to that choice. The works they made collaboratively through the 1920s-30s, usually in photography and photo-collage, often explore self-presentation, gender, and fantasy, such as a well-known series where Cahun acts as model for [a series of carnival-esque portraits](https://www.them.us/story/themstory-claude-cahun). Living publicly as middle-aged sisters on Jersey, the two formed a resistance practice to the Nazi forces that occupied the Island in 1940. They created tracts from [“The Soldier Without A Name,”](https://lbmisscharlie.tumblr.com/post/179286166176/marcel-moore-untitled-portraits-of-claude-cahun) a supposed insider in the German army, that expressed doubts about the Nazi method and ideology and “revealed” details about maneuvers feared by the soldiers. These they left in public places, including on car windshields, tucked into fences where soldiers might pass, in newspapers, and indeed sometimes in the pockets of passing soldiers. Their home was occupied by German soldiers, their studio searched multiple times, and they were both questioned multiple times but let go, the Germans unwilling to believe that two middle-aged women could be behind it. That is, until 1944. Arrested and imprisoned, they each attempted suicide but lived, only to be sentenced to death. Luckily, German surrender came before their executions and both were released; Claude died in 1954, never having physically recovered; Marcel lived until 1972. They are buried together.

December 1941, Columbia University Department of Art History, New York  
8\. On December 20, 1941, thirteen days after the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the US declaration of war, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Francis Henry Taylor, summoned forty-four fellow directors, curators, and academics of the leading art institutions in the East and Midwest to discuss the American museum community’s responsibilities in wartime. They issued a [resolution](http://www.monumentsmen.com/blog/2009/12/21/meeting-at-the-metropolitan/1936/) that museums and galleries are vitally important in times of war and should stay open and continue collecting, though many, as discussed in footnotes to Part 1, moved some of their most precious items to safer places. “For then [in times of war], when the petty and the trivial fall way and we are face to face with final and lasting values, we…must summon to our defenses all our intellectual and spiritual resources. We must guard jealously all we have inherited from a long past, all we are capable of creating in a trying present, and all we are determined to preserve in a foreseeable future.”

Following the meeting, Paul Sachs, director of the Fogg Museum at Harvard, and George Stout, the head of the Department of Conservation and Technical Research at the Fogg, hosted an additional series of seminars on the dangers facing the conservation of items removed from museums both in the US, and particularly, those in danger in Europe. Stout had already spent much of his burgeoning career on issues of conservation, and since the beginning of the war had turned his attention to the particular issues presented by air raids, billeting armies, and the voracious art appetites of the Nazi elites. In 1942, he published a pamphlet calling for the US government to take on the responsibility of responding to such dangers, entitled [_Protection of Monuments: A Proposal for Consideration During War and Rehabilitation._](https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/george-stout-draft-protection-monuments-16208) He argues for the necessity of preserving monuments and works of art not for the advance of the cause of war, but to maintain a basic and vital humanity: “To safeguard these things will not affect the course of battles, but it will affect the relations of invading armies with those peoples and [their] governments….To safeguard these things will show respect for the beliefs and customs of all men and will bear witness that these things belong not only to a particular people but also to the heritage of mankind. To safeguard these things is part of the responsibility that lies on the governments of the United Nations. These monuments are not merely pretty things, not merely valued signs of man’s creative power. They are expressions of faith, and they stand for man’s struggle to relate himself to his past and to his God.” Even though the US and Allied governments would not form the MFAA (Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section) until the summer of 1943, scholars in the US and Europe began to research and compile lists of important works as well as to create teaching materials to instruct soldiers on how to handle works — and to avoid unnecessary damage and looting. 

February 1943, Brooklyn, New York  
9\. The [war bond poster](https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/93511457/) Steve creates is real, though made later in 1944.

June 1943, Brooklyn, New York  
10\. There is, admittedly, some Marvel-esque bending of the truth happening here. While a number of the Monuments Men who went out in the field were, on average, older than you average first-time soldier, they still had to pass the Army physicals and get through Basic and all that jazz in order to actually receive their Commission. Some of the MFAA officers went through the School of Military Government but not all. They came from a variety of backgrounds and had differing expertise: from a British “gentleman scholar” to a Minnesota-based architect to a sculptor to the founder of the New York City Ballet to a variety of academic art historians and curators. While there were around 350 people working in the MFAA section, only around 60 were field officers, out on the combat zones of Europe, and most of them were in their thirties or forties, well educated with PhDs or professional degrees in design or architecture, and working in artistic, academic, or museum fields. To be honest, Steve wouldn’t have had enough experience or training to go out on his own as a field-based MFAA officer, and would have more likely been suited to be an enlisted assistant in the field or administrative staff in the US or UK. But it’s Marvel so why not!

February 1944, Monte Cassino, Italy  
11\. The battle of Cassino was one of the more gruesome of the war, lasting six weeks through January and February of 1944 as the Allies sought to break through the German Gustav Line across central Italy, between Rome and Naples. On the western end, fighting became centered around [Monte Cassino,](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4827392/Images-lines-WWII-S-Monte-Cassino.html) a fortified mountain at the top of which stood a monastery (sorry for the Daily Mail link, but it has great pictures). Founded by Saint Benedict in the sixth century, it was the location of the founding of his order, the Benedictine, and by the twentieth century held a vast library, collection of art, and a vibrant monastic community. By the time Allies were that close, much of the collection of art, books, and archives had been removed — some of it “gifted” by Mussolini to Hermann Goering’s private collection. During the battle, some commanders became convinced that the monastery itself was serving as a stronghold for German forces due to sharpshooting coming from the hill and the mountain became a vast symbolic stronghold preventing the Allied forces from moving forward. On February 15th, 1944, the US Army Air Force launched a massive aerial bombardment, destroying almost the entirety of the above-ground edifice. There were no German troops in the monastery — they were simply using the slopes for shooting. Instead, the bombing killed 230 civilians of hundreds who had taken refuge inside, and the rubble of the bombing proved useful for German paratroopers who landed and continued the battle for another three months. Sharply criticized by Catholic and Anglican church authorities and used as an example of Allied barbarity by the Axis propaganda machine, Monte Cassino became something of a flash point in the argument regarding the preservation of monuments in wartime. 

Endnotes to Part 3

May 1944, Molise Region, Italy  
1\. The first MFAA man in Italy, Mason Hammond, landed in Sicily a few weeks after the Allied invasion in July 1943, ill-prepared because, technically, the MFAA was only just being founded and he was the test subject. In the coming months, more officers were sent over and by February of 1944 MFAA HQ had moved from Sicily to Naples. As the lines were broken, they were able to move their work further afield. Because there were so few — only 22 officers in the field in Italy! — each Monuments Man worked largely alone, given a territory, a list of monuments, a vehicle — usually from the least desirable of the motor pool — and not a whole lot of authority beyond what they could muster due to rank and whatever force Eisenhower’s proclamation (see footnote 2). They encountered significant suspicion when engaging with Italian locals, as Axis propaganda had painted the MFAA as a group of looters and pillagers, an impression not helped by the large amounts of Allied bombing sustained in the area, including at Monte Cassino. As an aside, around December 1943 the name of the new commission was changed from “Fine Arts and Monuments” to “Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives” allegedly because Hammond’s Boston accent made it sound like “Finance and Monuments” to the British on the committee. 

2\. [Eisenhower’s declaration](https://text-message.blogs.archives.gov/2014/02/10/general-dwight-d-eisenhower-and-the-protection-of-cultural-property/), issued on December 29th, 1943, was aimed at both stopping looting and casual destruction by individual soldiers and the destruction of historical sites and objects during battle. It argued for a consideration of military necessity rather than military convenience in such matters, but also recognized that in cases where the lives of Allied soldiers were at risk, their lives were more important that historical preservation. It was also the first introduction of the Monuments Men to the broader Armed Forces. The proclamation was at the heart of the discussions around the bombing of Monte Cassino, with many arguing that its destruction was to save lives and others arguing that not enough information supported the idea that it was being used as a fortress by the Germans and thus its destruction would not give significant benefit. While the proclamation was distributed to all Allied troops in December, it was only after Monte Cassino that it was made public. 

3\. Most of the locations Steve visits are fictionalized — real places, sometimes, but I’ve made up the details of the art and architecture, as well as specific damage sustained. Many of the actions and tactics used by Steve, though, are inspired by those of actual Monuments Men — such as pulling the threat of bureaucratic paperwork. 

June 1944, Caprarola, Italy  
4\. The removal of the Madonna statue was broadly inspired by the removal of a [Madonna from a destroyed church in La Gleize, Belgium](https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/statue-virgin-mary-inside-la-gleize-church-belgium-after-battle-bulge-15134). Monuments Man Walker Hancock worked to convince the locals that she needed to be moved lest the weather and damage to the church continue to harm her, but there was resistance to the idea. Many felt that, like St. Paul’s in London, so long as the Madonna continued to stand, so too would the town, nearly decimated by the Battle of the Bulge. As he tried to convince them, the roof of the church gave way and fell mere feet from where the sculpture stood, enough of a sign that they removed her to a cellar right then.

July 1944, Azzano, Italy  
5\. Santa Veronica Giuliani was a nun in Umbria who had visions and received the marks of both the crown of thorns and the stigmata, the five wounds received by Christ during the Crucifixion (on the hands, feet, and side). She died in 1727 and was made a saint a century later; as such, her body was interred and supposedly found to be “incorrupt” or not susceptible to normal human rotting. Thus, her body parts were never actually separated for relics, as was common with medieval saints. For the storage of relics, it was common to build a reliquary, a case often highly decorated in which the body parts, or sometimes fragments of materials such as wood from the cross, would be placed. They were sometimes shaped in the form of whatever the relic was, such as a golden hand to hold finger bones.

6\. The hamlet of Azzano does have a nice little church, but I have no idea if it has a Last Judgment mural. They were, however, very popular: showing Christ at the top directing souls into either heaven or hell after death, often complete with ghastly tortures and gruesome demons awaiting those damned, they served as a fairly weighty reminder to church-goers that their actions on earth mattered in the eyes of God and the church. The Florentine style of Michelangelo, et al, is what we commonly describe as “High Renaissance” — big, fleshy figures, use of single-point perspective, the mathematics of which had been laid down just a generation earlier, by artists and draftsmen including Brunelleschi and Alberti in Florence, and a naturalistic attention to drapery and three-dimensional modeling, taken from close study of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture.

1944, Altaussee, Austria  
7\. In the winter of 1943-4, the [salt mines in Altaussee,](https://www.aaa.si.edu/blog/2014/03/monuments-men-inside-the-mines) as well as similar mines further north like Heilbronn and Bernterode, were requisitioned by Nazi high command for storage of the massive amounts of art, gold, books, archives, furniture, and other precious objects they had stolen. They pilfered indiscriminately: artworks were taken from German collections and museums and churches in occupied territories alike, as well as stolen from private Jewish citizens, and the mines also included crates of gold wedding rings stolen from Jewish people interned in concentration camps as well as gold fillings prised from the mouths of those murdered in the death camps.

While the mines did hold dangers, the drying characteristics of salt helped keep the humidity relatively low, the cool dark prevented extreme temperature fluctuations, and the location deep in the mountains, underground and far from major cities, provided protection from bombings. After the miners were eventually ordered out, water leakage was a problem in some mines such as Heilbronn, which needed to be constantly pumped out. At Altausee, the works were at first accompanied by conservators who set up a lab within the mine to monitor damage; with the advancing of the Allied troops they fled. 

To Altaussee Hitler sent many of the objects amassed for his grand museum planned for Linz. Of the thousands of works stored at Altaussee, some of the most famous include the [Ghent Altarpiece](https://www.getty.edu/foundation/initiatives/current/panelpaintings/panel_paintings_ghent.html), the massive (12’ x 16’) early 15th century altarpiece created by brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck; the [Bruges Madonna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna_of_Bruges), a marble sculpture by Michelangelo; and two pieces by Vermeer, [_The Artist’s Studio_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Painting) and [_The Astronomer._](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Astronomer_\(Vermeer\)) They almost didn’t make it out.

In March 1945, in a desperate attempt to stave off Allied forces, Hitler issued a so-called “Nero decree” ordering the destruction of any infrastructure that the enemy might use, including transportation, communication, industrial, and food-supply facilities. A month later, the local Austrian Nazi authority, seemingly very happy to carry out such commands, sent eight crates containing bombs to be placed inside the mine at Altaussee. Though Hitler’s will, written days before his suicide on April 30th, declared his intention that all the works he “amassed” (ie stole) should be donated to the State in order to complete his vision of a massive museum at Linz, local authorities including that at Altaussee determined to carry on with destruction, artwork or not. However, sometime in the first week of May, before Allied troops arrived at the mine on May 8th, conspirators worked to remove the bombs and blow the tunnel entrances only, thus keeping the works safe from anyone who might wish to replace the bombs. This was the state MFAA men Robert Posey and Lincoln Kirstein found the mine. The tunnels took a week to clear and the some 10,000 objects inside another month and a half to catalogue and remove.

Of the hundreds of thousands of cultural objects stolen by the Nazis, many [remain lost or presumed destroyed](https://www.monumentsmenfoundation.org/join-the-hunt/additional-missing-works-of-art). Efforts to repatriate objects to both state and private collections, or to the descendants of collectors murdered in the death camps, are ongoing; they will likely continue for many decades as generations with direct ties to the looting, movement, and sale of stolen art die. These efforts continue to raise legal questions, particularly around objects sold by Jewish collectors before fleeing Europe or those donated or sold to museums with false provenance. If you’re interested in learning more, the Smithsonian has a [good bibliography on looted art and repatriation](http://provenance.si.edu/jsp/bibliography.aspx).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for reading. The genesis of this fic began years ago, with a stray thought regarding my fondness for AUs where Steve joins the war in a different capacity. As I was researching and writing it over the past year, though, our current political climate made its message feel more urgent. In trying times, it can be tempting to direct all our attention to the fight. But the arts — both our vast and varied cultural heritages and those things we make here and now — are not disposable, are not optional. They not only give succor to those tired of the fight, they declare loudly and beautifully the type of world we want to live it, the world we fight to build. Create on, my friends.


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